Free Internet Router

Overview

When we landed in our new offices, we had a problem. We didn’t have access to any good WiFi. We could use our building’s slow internet or pay our ISPs even more money. We like to be scrappy here in the Garage. So what did we do? We hacked our internet router (legally).

One of the local Service Providers here in Brooklyn does a pretty shady thing and reuses their rented routers to rebroadcast a second network for other paying customers to use. They offer this as another perk and are essentially double-timing their paying customers. But if you are a paying customer, you can access the Internet through this mesh network of routers.

The Problem

Cyril is a paying Internet customer at home so he could just bring us his WiFi login to use in our office right? (Thank you, Cyril)

Sadly, no. This network login would only work for a small number of devices. The internet provider doesn’t allow more than a few devices connected to the same network at the same time. We couldn’t use this for every laptop and device in our office.

So we engineered our way around it.

Development

We built a custom router device that would connect to the Mesh Network and create its own private network bridged from that network. The Garage can now connect to this private router and have our own networked environment at their studio with an unlimited number of devices connected to it.

The device was built on a Raspberry Pi 4B and a WiFi adapter to connect to the network. The hard part was navigating the networking protocols. It required writing in-house networking software. Luckily, Cyril is a networking genius so now we enjoy unlimited WiFi on an unlimited number of local devices.

The best part is this device makes our Internet connection even more secure and is free-to-use. We also throw in a couple upgrades. Cyril bumped the router up with 1TB of memory and used a technology called Network-Attached Storage to store engineering books, resources, and software programs for local devices on our network.