I came across an interesting article this morning on the BBC, wherein a man in London, England became the third person arrested for 'stealing' wireless signals, inspiring some debate as to whether it really should be illegal to do so.
It is, as the article states, easy enough for a person to set up simple encryption on their wireless access point to keep people from easily using their signal, and in most cases it would seem this would be a strong enough hint that that particular signal is not intended for public use. When my connection has gone down for a length of time in the past, or when I've been travelling, I've felt no shame for finding the strongest available unsecure network to troubleshoot any problems with my ISP, or to check my e-mail and such while away. As new neighbours have come in over the past few years, more of the networks around me have become secured, but still leaving one or two viable options.
Surely enough, there are ways to work around those safeguards, but not taking the hint that the network is secured, and then attempting to circumvent it then starts to become an issue of hacking versus 'stealing' wireless signals, and should be treated as such.
Once a wireless signal is broadcast however, it is out there, in its limited range, traveling at the speed of light, so I'm not sure how it itself can be stolen. Of course this in most cases would be a question of semantics, where the general idea is that connecting to a wireless access point in turn gives you access to the internet. And this is likely where the whole issue became a sticking point in the first place, with the large provider companies having the money to attempt to force action against the practice. At this point one could get into the whole debate over how internet service charges, at least around here, seem to generally increase, with no increase, or infact some decreases in the quality of service, but that can be saved for another rant.
The fact is most people either pay for a set bandwidth, which in most cases I've ever seen goes 90% unused, or pay for an unlimited bandwidth service. Now, if the 'offending' wireless 'thief' is legitimate in just using the wireless access occasionally to check e-mail, troubleshoot their own connection problem, or even browse the news, the actual data transfer is a tiny fraction of even a 10 gigabyte per month service. On the other hand, if people go ahead and attempt to use a neighbour's connection for file sharing and the like, easily transferring large amounts of data, then concern may be warranted. Nonetheless, if you and your neighbour were to come to an agreement to do so, without defaulting on payments either for the initial service, or any charges for going over bandwidth, then there should be no way for that to be an illegal practice. In either the low or high bandwidth case, the service is paid for, and the user has willingly left their access point open to anyone with the capability to see it.
From the service perspective, it is somewhat similar to the debate of whether it should be chargeable to split your cable TV signal once it is in your home, and suffering the associated loss in signal strength, and so quality, if you so choose. Like the article states, it is no different than using the light from someone's window to read by, nor is it disparate from benefitting from the heat or cold of surrounding units in an apartment building.
Simply if you don't want people using your wireless connection, encrypt it. If ISP's don't want shared service, then they should give step by step instructions as to how to configure their router so as not to provide access to the service (though it should still allow for unsecure access to that wireless network for local networking should the user wish).