Can I faraday cage my ISP-issued router in order to use my own?
I have a family member living on my property in a separate but adjacent living space, close enough together to share my router's wifi. She likes to let her youtube app endlessly autoplay talking head news videos at full volume due to her hearing loss, and this goes on for a few hours in the mornings. The sound through the walls is annoying but headphones block enough that it's a non-issue as long as I can load something to play through them. The real rub is that I also would like to do something on the laptop during breakfast and her neverending news autoplay eats up all the bandwidth I am paying for when I want to use it. I can't cut off her internet, but I could prioritize my traffic over hers in the morning so that I can load an episode of something and listen through headphones. Yes I know this would be a bit unscrupulous but I have already suggested she not doomscroll via youtube all morning, to no avail.
Setting up a separate ISP account for the adjacent space isnt an option for the time being. The router/modem combo is ISP-issued and locked down by default due to too many service calls from people breaking stuff in settings. As far as I know it is not able to be swapped out to an off-the-shelf due to this being fiber optic internet, plus I'm only so-so in tech knowledge.
Which leads me to the title, can I put the ISP-issued router in a faraday cage, connect my own router via ethernet and be able to control settings via that route? Any reason I shouldn't/couldn't?
You have fiber yet not enough bandwidth to support more than a single YouTube video? What awful ISP is that?
Also to answer your question, it won't work if you can't set the ISP router to bridge mode if you want to run your own router.
when the telco here ran fiber out to the edge of town where the schools are, they moved all the customers along that route to the new fiber (and disconnected them from the copper network at the same time). they offered internet speeds starting at '10 meg' (10mbps), going up to 1 gig (1000mbps). many customers chose the slowest and cheapest option (dsl over copper was topping-out at about 15mbit at the time), even though it was only like $20 more to get 100mbit.
to this day, over a decade later, there's still customers on that 10mbps plan. and because the telco does telco things. those customers are paying the same rate (or more) as a new customer signing up for 100mbit (or the comparable 'fastest available' dsl on the copper lines, which is 60mbit these days). no automatic speed bump up, no discount for the slower plan, and zero communication about rates and options. the money flows in regardless, why tell the person giving it to you that they're getting shafted.
I don't know the full history of my isp but this sounds about right, looks like I could pay a little more for a good bump in speed.
I'll probably just go ahead with that but set up my own router anyway because there's other benefits besides prioritizing traffic
I'm always amazed at how much you pay for internet in the US and Canada. Here in France, fiber vs copper is usually the same price maybe a 5-10 euros/month difference depending on the ISP
It is a monopoly issue. In the US, the companies have the monopoly on political control, not the people. That is the main reason ISPs are so f-ed up. The literally outlawed competition.
Am in US, it's probably just area dependant, u see a similar price discrepancy where I am at.
Could be some rural area or a budget plan with low bandwidth. Both are fairly common among people I'm acquainted with.
Bridge mode isn't necessary as long as you make sure the IP of the new 3rd party router is different than the ISP router's. Although bridge mode would be best, in OP's case, they said that the router is locked down and they don't have access to it.
Just use the new router in AP mode, or just buy an AP.
Now that a day and the annoyance have passed and many replies have pointed out, there's clearly better ways to solve this.
One being I should probably pay a bit more for the not hugely throttled connection speed, or ask the ISP to set their router to bridge mode. But probably both.