Theft in the cable industry is rounding a new turn with the advent of advanced wireless technology.  Wi-Fi hot spots have been cropping up like dandelions over the last few years. You see them in coffeehouses, airports, hotels and convention centers. But the growing popularity of Wi-Fi (Microsoft touted XP's ability to help service providers establish hot spots when the software was released last year) has also led to theft of the signal.

Filching High-Speed -- Wireless local area networks have a range of about 300 feet, and those wishing to use someone else's service could use sniffers to find the signals, and piggyback onto a subscriber's service. Time Warner Cable in New York City recently sent out about a dozen letters to users who are redistributing their service to others.
 
Once the problem had been brought to Time Warner's attention, the culprits were easy to identify because they were brazenly listed on NYC wireless' Web site (http://www.nycwireless.net), which features maps with locations of wireless nodes in several cities.
"There was a lot of activity on that Web site about how someone can acquire the service and then pass it along to others for free," Suzanne Giuliani, a Time Warner spokeswoman, tells Pipeline. "We told them in the letters that if they continue to use the service in this manner, we'll suspend their accounts."

Bleeding Data -- Wi-Fi pirates can set up their service as a community server, where the users can split up the monthly fee,
 

or profit by reselling the service. Because wireless signals "bleed" in the 300 feet area, there's also unintentional distribution of the signals.

AT&T Broadband also is about to send out warning letters to subscribers who are violating its acceptable use policy and subscriber agreements. AT&T isn't saying how many users its targeting for the letters, or where the problem areas are. AT&T launched a wireless service late last year through a partnership with Linksys (http://www.linksys.com).

"[Wi-Fi theft] is not something that is pervasive across our general user base," Sarah Eder, AT&T Broadband's spokeswoman, explains. "We consider education to be the first step, so there's an educational effort underway to get customers to encrypt their home networks."

Declaring War -- Aside of the sniffers, which are used by both MSOs and thieves, Eder says there are "war driving" and "war chalking" in the search for wireless signals. With war driving the potential users drive around looking for signals, while war chalking is a chalk mark that indicates where a hot spot is.
 
One method of thwarting Wi-Fi bandits could be consumption-based billing. If subscribers exceed their agreed upon bandwidth limit they'll be charged accordingly, but with the bleeding that occurs apartment neighbors could be cross-billed for inadvertently using each other services.