MTS-Fon - Wi-Fi network at the expense of Stream clients

If you are a Stream customer (recently renamed MTS Home Internet), Comstar, MGTS Internet or any other brand owned by Sistema Telecom, know that neighbors and passers-by use your Internet access. Perfectly, and legally.

Details under the cut.


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It all started with the fact that I, unexpectedly for myself, became a client of “Home Internet from MGTS”. We temporarily moved to my sister's apartment, where there was simply no other Internet.

I will say right away: access to internet is vital for me. We have several SaaS applications in the States with our partner, source hosting in the same place (github and bitbucket), version updates several times a day, websites, servers, databases, Amazon Shmamazon, and so on. You understand.

So, the speed categorically did not suit me. Stability too. It was absolutely impossible to play Battlefield 3 to work and code. After numerous fruitless inquiries and consultations with the support service, I humbled myself ...

But all of a sudden, once again rebooting the router, I noticed that the MTS / FON WiFi network (which is clearly not mine - this is WiFi from MTS! And there is little around neighboring networks ...) , disappears and appears simultaneously with the restart of my router. By simple manipulations, it turned out that this SSID really comes from my router. Moreover, free of charge and without authorization.

I will not describe my numerous attempts to disconnect this network, assign at least a password to it (everything was reset after the modem was rebooted), my calls to the MTS support service, and numerous complaints I found from my brothers in misfortune and so on. I will go straight to the point.

What was it

So, if you bought an “official” Wi-Fi router (that is, in the Stream / MTS / MGTS / Comstar salon, with the company logo, as in the picture, etc.), this device creates two Wi-Fi networks. One is your home. The second is called “MTS / FON”, which he distributes to everyone.

For this network in your channel (paid, I will note!) It is reserved approximately 1-1.5 Mbit.

You become the access point of the MTS-FON wireless network.

You can read about this network on the MTS website . In short, it is part of the worldwide free network “FON” (see the description on Wikipedia ), in which users voluntarily share with each other their access to the Network. By distributing this network from your apartment, you presumably gain access to FON networks anywhere in the world.

But the key word here is “voluntarily.” When buying about this feature does not warn. An inexperienced user simply cannot disable this function in the router, because after a reboot, the router again takes its configuration from the provider's server. Support staff cannot answer intelligible questions about the “background”. And it seems that they intentionally leave the answer.

And the most unpleasant thing is that the quality of communication suffers from this “background” (dozens of people mourn about this on the Stream forums). After all, “branded” routers are made on the basis of cheap Chinese devices that simply do not pull two WiFi networks. Not to mention the fact that I, to put it mildly, hurt that out of my legitimate 10 Mbps, 1.5 Mbits are given "to the side." Without any notice and ability to disable.

What to do

1. For a start - do not buy rebrand modems from the provider.
2. Check if there is a network in your apartment called “MTS / FON”.
3. If you find one, go to the modem / router settings (192.168.1.1 or something like that).
4. In the settings of the router (where specifically it depends on the model, most likely it will be in the same place where you set the admin password) find the “ACS URL” field. This is the address from where your router takes the provider configuration. On my modem, it looks like this: d.pr/f7RV
5. Save the value of this field somewhere.
6. Clear this field and click save.
7. Only then disable FON in the settings of the router. Where exactly - again, I will not say, depends on the model.