BT WiFi / hotspots?

[Mikita-EU]

This may be a slightly redundant question, but I thought I'd go ahead and ask. My SO and I have just moved into a new place, and we're getting BT and the wifi box sent to us next week. Meanwhile, I can log onto BT Wifi X on my phone, which is fine, and BT Wifi With FON on my laptop and PC.

Basically, how secure will it be to log into games like WoW + LoL over these networks? It's a hotspot so technically it's a public connection, but I don't want to connect to it if playing games on these networks will cause havok. Any thoughts?!

Cheers!

[Magnerz]

How secure your login information being sent is dependant on the protocol being used to send the information. So it's completely up to Blizzard/Riot. I can only assume that login information is being sent via an encrypted protocol so it should be safe.

Also I'd like to point out that ALL wireless traffic is inherently vulnerable to packet sniffing, but if someone were to do this they'd need to be local to you (within the range of the access point you're using).

TLDR - Don't worry about it. You'll be fine.

[Deleted]

I used wifi with fon when i was waiting ( 3 months) for a BT engineer to come sort my line out, no issues at all except it was kinda laggy.

[Mikita-EU]

How secure your login information being sent is dependant on the protocol being used to send the information. So it's completely up to Blizzard/Riot. I can only assume that login information is being sent via an encrypted protocol so it should be safe.

Also I'd like to point out that ALL wireless traffic is inherently vulnerable to packet sniffing, but if someone were to do this they'd need to be local to you (within the range of the access point you're using).

TLDR - Don't worry about it. You'll be fine.

Ah I see. Thanks for that! On a support page it told me to install a Cisco VPN, which I'll be sure to do. For my PC it's used for nothing but gaming, so hopefully it won't be too bad. The only thing I'm curious about is that the actual hotspot is a customer's BT Home Hub itself. It sets up two connections - one for themselves, and for the public. This wouldn't cause too many issues, would it? Then again, I'm in London.

I used wifi with fon when i was waiting ( 3 months) for a BT engineer to come sort my line out, no issues at all except it was kinda laggy.

3 months?! Wow. Did you additionally install a VPN? What kind of lag did you experience?

[Magnerz]

Ah I see. Thanks for that! On a support page it told me to install a Cisco VPN, which I'll be sure to do. For my PC it's used for nothing but gaming, so hopefully it won't be too bad. The only thing I'm curious about is that the actual hotspot is a customer's BT Home Hub itself. It sets up two connections - one for themselves, and for the public. This wouldn't cause too many issues, would it? Then again, I'm in London.

If the hotspot is a customers HomeHub you'll be limited by their internet connection or if you were to drag it down too much, they could turn it off entirely. But your average user isn't that smart and would probably phone BT and complain at their connection speed than fix it themselves.

I don't know what page you've been reading, but what the heck would you need a VPN for? All you need is to set your firewall up accordingly, in Windows Vista/7/8 for example when you connect to the hotspot it'll ask you if it's home/work or public, you'll choose public. This'll keep your computer safe and locked up against anyone else who might be using the public access point.

I'll add onto this too, about VPNs. A Virtual Private Network, is just an internal network that can be ran over the internet and because of that requires encryption so that people on the internet can't intercept the packets of information being sent and use it.

If all you want to do is connect to the internet and play games, you just need to connect to the hotspot/wireless access point and set your firewall up accordingly so you don't do things like share your hardrive to everyone else connected to that hotspot/WAP. That's even assuming BT lets the public section of the WAP route traffic between users. It might already be set up to only allow each user to connect to the internet and nothing else.

[Deleted]

BT Wifi FON Is mesh networking, BT will encrypt your account data when you log into the FON network, Source: https://www.btwifi.co.uk/help/security/

That said many of the FON routers are "Home Hub's". As such I would not want to access sensitive date or websites on FON. Just a word of caution.

Regards,

[CarolAdlon]

I agree, its fine just a lot of lagging. Good luck anyway.