I attend a university in the United States where the school policy states that "Students are not permitted to setup or use their own wireless networks." This includes personal hotspots that come with one's phone plan, bluetooth connections, etc. I had some concerns about this policy and wrote to ...
They certainly wouldn't be the first institution with incompetent IT. Note that you can turn off "visibility" in most devices offering a hotspot function - you'll have to enter the networks SSID manually, but detecting the network is at least slightly less trivial. If they still enforce such arcane rules, they're probably not capable of that either.
@towe I wouldn't jump to conclusions re: incompetence. Lots of places I worked at had rules about setting up wireless connections for security reasons. Essentially, as an organization, you are normally not interested in people setting up a lot of grassroot connections to the outside world, all of which bypass your firewall, content filtering systems, etc.
@towe Although I think the policy is much too strict if it forbids even short-range connections, I can certainly see why it exists in general. Although wireless devices are required to cope with interference, that doesn't mean they'll remain able to provide quality service during interference. If (for example) someone sets up a test lab with 10 APs in their dorm room, and a stream of "your Wi-Fi is slow and I can't do my work" complaints starts flowing to the IT, there are limits as to how far you can call it incompetence on the IT's part.
Side comment. Why not create your own wired network? Google "USB Tethering". I'm assuming they want to ban wi-fi tethering because of interference, not ban you from using your mobile phone for data that doesn't originate within it. The latter would be unreasonable, and possibly not a lawful distinction.
@nigel222 I had mixed results using USB tethering. I used it at my uni not because any rules but to save phone battery when my notebook refused to connect to uni network.
They say cell phones are safe on planes now but I still put mine in airplane mode. It's possible that the rule stems from an incident where a student masqueraded as the school WiFi and intercepted user data as it traveled through their network. If the victim complained that their computer was "hacked" because they used the "school" network then they would blame the school and give the IT guys an unsolvable/untraceable headache.
That a device must accept interference does not imply that the device's owner must permit the operation of other (interfering) devices on the owner's private property.
Your assessment of "property rights" misses the mark, your quote says the owner of the unlicensed device has no special rights, not that the owner of the facility has no special rights. So in fact you're arguing against the student having any right to use his device.
I believe the initial issue this was addressing, was that students would connect to the school network through a wired connection and then set up their wireless router to connect to the internet through that. This resulted in huge security holes for the school network.
Fun fact: my university did discourage operating one's own wireless router in its website, but there was no clause against doing so in the official signed contract. But to maintain goodwill, I used a Wi-Fi analyzer app to change my router's channel so it wouldn't conflict with the existing network, hid the SSID, and named my network to make it look like an auto-generated Wi-Fi Direct from a printer. No one complained.
Discussion on question by Noah: Can a…
Discussion on question by Noah: Can a…