Amazingly, those are advertised as "included amenities", as if they were a good thing. I'm sure a large number of people are fine with the idea of a managed internet - or they just don't understand.
Get a mobile hotspot. I've been using one (Verizon) practically as my only internet provider for a while now. 5G up and down speeds are totally acceptable for everything I do. And there's nothing an apartment complex can do about it. You can also share your phone's internet with other devices. Obviously the real answer is to not live there! But if you must, it's not an internet death sentence.
I agree – the introduction of 5G base stations is absolutely crushing cable monopolies. It's beautiful to see. I remember the day I called Comcast to say "goodbye, I'm switching, and no I don't want to bundle a phone plan with my unreliable cable connection."
Do they block you from using your own wired connection too, or just Wi-Fi?
Asking you not to set up your own Wi-Fi actually doesn't seem wholly and completely unreasonable to me? It could plausibly lead to congestion and worse performance for everyone.
It reminds me of my college dorm. Every dorm had an ethernet jack, and there was a communal WiFi network, but we were asked to not create our own WiFi hotspots.
This is even a problem in neighborhoods where the townhouses are pretty close to each other. I was in one and there were fifty hot spots that were visible.
Those rules are usually void [0]. There are quite a few caveats, but if you have a private balcony, you can generally put up whatever antennae you want, regardless of what the apartment rules say.
Had this in China years ago. The solution was we dressed up a worker from my fiber optic provider in a borrowed cable provider uniform to haul the cable. It took months to arrange, but I was pretty amused when it worked!
The last apartment I lived in (2019) was in the process of switching to building-run Internet, forcing us to give up our individual cable modems for the building WiFi. They had something like a limit of 15 devices you were allowed to connect and no Ethernet/wired, it was WiFi only.
When I talked to them about it they seemed completely befuddled as to why someone might need more than 15 WiFi connections or why someone would need a wired connection.
Thankfully I was moving out and just slow-rolled giving up my equipment until I left.
relative's apartment / townhome complex in Nashville did similar about a year ago. They had to stop paying comcast direct and instead pay comcast through the complex.
This caused many days of customer support issues with their owned / not rented cable modem, and then very interesting discussions about the now separated cell phone bill and previously subsidized cell phones.
I think it took 2 months to sort those things out.
For at least 2 months they had to pay both the complex and comcast for cable in order to keep the cell phones from being disconnected.
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[ 7.0 ms ] story [ 555 ms ] threadHere's an old example https://www.biggerpockets.com/forums/432/topics/554933-cable...
Asking you not to set up your own Wi-Fi actually doesn't seem wholly and completely unreasonable to me? It could plausibly lead to congestion and worse performance for everyone.
It reminds me of my college dorm. Every dorm had an ethernet jack, and there was a communal WiFi network, but we were asked to not create our own WiFi hotspots.
[0]: https://www.fcc.gov/media/over-air-reception-devices-rule
When I talked to them about it they seemed completely befuddled as to why someone might need more than 15 WiFi connections or why someone would need a wired connection.
Thankfully I was moving out and just slow-rolled giving up my equipment until I left.
This caused many days of customer support issues with their owned / not rented cable modem, and then very interesting discussions about the now separated cell phone bill and previously subsidized cell phones.
I think it took 2 months to sort those things out.
For at least 2 months they had to pay both the complex and comcast for cable in order to keep the cell phones from being disconnected.
Do not feel like it was a win for the tenants.