Yeah. Twenty years ago. I worked for two ISPs over the years. At both of them the test accounts for support to use were unmonitored accounts due to how many places they were used and logged in by. In both cases I simply put those login details into my home setup and got free internet for probably about three years. Before that some friends got a un/pw file from a university and decrypted a few hundred names and passwords for accounts which gave free dialup access to students. Again multiple logins seemed allowed so the only person losing was the uni/isp. Used to be able to pull about ~14gb a month through a dialup connection. Probably via napster, kazaa and soulseek, I can’t remember if torrents were a thing back then.

Back when I was housing insecure but still had a place of my own to live, I first set up a point-to-point wifi link to some kids across the street to defray my internet expenses - they paid part of my bill instead of having their own internet. That was more than a decade ago and the hardware & software weren’t so reliable. When the arrangement fell apart and I no longer could pay the bill, I cracked the network of some neighbors in my building and used the same antenna to provide internet for myself and 3 others in my house for about a year. The neighbors were a nice young couple so I did my best to be decent about it - set up an always-on permanent VPN and used flow control to limit our max throughput.

It’s still possible to do this, and I’m still broke, so after a few years not needing to do any such thing, I cracked a network to have internet during a housesitting gig (house did not have internet).

Edit: get WiFi 6 or better gear for this. Trust me, the improvement in performance in marginal situations is well worth it. WiFi 6 was a big improvement over WiFi 5, which was a big improvement over WiFi 4, when it comes to staying connected and getting data across a dodgy link. I haven’t done much straight up piracy lately but I have done plenty of leeching in parking lots, and WiFi 6 gear is absolutely worth the money.

When I was in college, I rented a house just outside my budget and found I couldn’t afford things like cable internet.

I had a wifi->ethernet bridge that was originally to connect my OG Xbox to a wifi network. I also had neighbors with Wifi using WEP encryption. An idea was born.

Was able to use aircrack-ng on my laptop to crack their WEP key in about 15 minutes. Plugged that key into my wifi->ethernet bridge, and then hooked that into my router. Bam, my whole house was online.

That worked for probably a year and a half.

I’m sharing an internet connection with my neighbors for these reasons. In germany, we have “freifunk” which is just what you’re explaining I think. I would definitely love to maximize this though.

I used to crack my neighbour’s WEP secured Wifi back in the day.

NEVER SUBBED NEVER DONATED ADBLOCK ON STOLEN LAPTOP NEIGHBOURS WIFI MOMMAS HOUSE STOLEN SOLAR PANELS STOLEN SUN SOLAR ENERGY STOLEN WATER WHEEL NEIGHBOURS RIVER STOLEN HYDROELECTRIC PLANT CHARGING PHONE WITH WORK ELECTRICITY SHOWER IN BATHROOM SINK STOLEN FOOD FROM CAFETERIA STOLEN HAMSTER STOLEN HAMSTER WHEEL KINETIC ENERGY FREE ENTERTAINMENT

I may or may not be using P2P devices to share my Internet with all my neighbors.

But I also paid to have the neighborhood wired with fiber for internet.

About 20 years ago, there was only dial-up internet available in my street. My parents lived about 200 m away from me in another street, and they could get ADSL. So I set up a wireless bridge to them, and it worked surprisingly well after some tweaking. Kept it running for a few years, eventually got my own connection because one day my dad called me because he needed the router password. Turns out he was also sharing the connection with his neighbour who was running an internet radio station.

Back in my teenage ps3 days, my then neighbour’s didn’t set a password and the WiFi was completely open.

I’ve been stealing your wifi this hole time.

In Germany we have an initiative called Freifunk (roughly „Free Wireless Radio“). They are building free wifi mesh networks in larger cities. Their members use their ISP connection with special mesh network router software. The initiative collects donations to improve their infrastructure and fend off liability claims.

Edit: There has been a thread about Freifunk here already.

I know someone who does business IT where the ISP were trying to charge a huge amount to connect fibre to one of their sites. Thankfully, they had another site a few miles away that was already connected. They found it was cheaper to stick a pole on each building with an omnidirectional WiFi antenna. Apparently the speeds weren’t too bad even though ping often left a little to be desired.

There are a few towns that became their own internet providers b/c the big guys wouldn’t bring them either any or adequate service and they realized they could do it themselves more cheaply. They had to fight anti-socialism propaganda and of course lobbying and disinformation campaigns from the big providers, despite the fact that they had no intention of ever going there.

Not pirated but my local cooperative ISP is offering to split the fiber connection with neighbors and give advice on how to do so.

We can even have two bills, two completely separated intense accesses on one fiber connection and they will split the bill in two, or three, or four (plus add a few euros for administrative fees)

Not exactly, but when I was in student dorms, the day when the contract ended if you booked for next year you paid basically nothing and got the highest tier of speeds, I assume its a bug in their system or something because its only for that 1 day and they dont advertise it as a special offer.