What are the dangers of giving a tenant free wifi

[Matt Webb]

Heyo,

I'm new to BP and just bought my first home. I decided to start home hacking and renting out my walkout basement. I have very good internet and thought it would be nice to offer "free wifi" but not sure of the dangers. I was planning on putting a clause in the lease saying they promise to not do any illegal downloading or viewing illegal sites. I also thought about getting a separate wireless router that will allow me to throttle speeds and blocks access to known illegal sites. Also thought about setting the router up to only allow for their devices MAC address so I can tie them to what ever sites they might have visited illegally. 

Has anyone had experience with this? and/or thoughts on how to protect myself from being responsible from them doing illegal activity on my internet connection?

Thank you in advance for any help.

Matt

[Roy N.]

If you search here on BP you will find other long running threads debating the topic of providing "complementary" Internet access to tenants.   

We provide a high speed (fibre) connection into all our properties for our building monitoring system.  Since there is oodles of bandwidth we are not using, we provide complementary Internet access to our tenants - a separate network per unit.

IMHO, the liability issue raised here and in the other threads is a strawman.   Internet access is a utility service like telephone or electricity.   Lots of landlords rent with utilities included - if the tenant grows pot in their bedroom using the "included" electricity and water, the landlord is not responsible (provided s/he does not know about the activities).  It's no different if the tenant commits a crime using the complementary/included Internet access.