Technology

You shall not use or attempt to use a device or software (such as NAT, Address Masquerading, Proxying, or the connection of an additional wireless router) that would allow you to connect more than the number of devices set out in the Service Information to the Network.

One of the ways they detect this is by checking the TTL of the packets coming from the "one" device is less than expected. If your router is using OpenWrt, you can configure an iptables rule to reset the TTL of outgoing packets to the default.

So in regards to specifically VR, I'm just going to make the blind assumption that your headset is a quest 2 or something along those lines. For the time being on campus, you might just want to consider running VR through a physical USB-C link cable rather than jumping through so many hoops on the router setup. A decent cable will run you like $20 US or how ever that translates to local. The quality of the connection is generally about the same as wireless, the main drawback is usually a wired link can't put through enough energy to recharge you headset on top of the data transfer, so your battery will slowly drain over a few hours. There are also link cables that you can additionally plug your charger into so you don't slowly run out of battery, but I think the build quality on those is often sketchy. Either way something to consider.

Pretty sure you could end around their TOS by connecting a PC with 2 Ethernet ports to the provider's internet and connect your router to the PC with the 2nd port. In the PC's OS bridge the 2 ports together, and disable the routers firewall.

It shouldn’t surprise you that major organizations like to protect their infrastructure.

If you are really worried about getting caught not following the exact rules as written, you could always pay for multi device connections... then they won't care.

But it's definitely possible to set up your VR router in a way that is not gonna bother anything. Most people in this thread don't know that your VR router doesn't need internet access. If the VR stream is all it is doing, it can be isolated from the internet, and the isp won't know or care it exists.

The other thing about rules, that they don't tell us autistic people, is that following rules is actually kind of optional. Certainly more optional than it feels like to us. Think about it in terms of what the people were thinking when they wrote the rules, and who will be enforcing the rules and what they will care about. And what the enforcement of the rules would look like. (In this case, the most likely initial outcome of them enforcing these rules would be either an e-mail or paper letter telling you they noticed you are breaking a rule, possibly with details to help you stop breaking it, but likely not). Try to sus out the "spirit" of the rules rather than the letter of the rules. That is how all the other humans use rules and why to us it always feels like everyone is breaking all the rules and getting away with it.

If you follow every rule to the letter... you really can't do anything. At all. Like, literally, even we are breaking rules we don't yet know about every single day.

My university was pretty zen about this

essentially, "don't use your own access point/router please. But if you do, please talk to your resident (University employed) student IT rep and they can probably help you set it up correctly."

I would set up your router, turn off ssid broadcast and forget about it. It's doubtful they have the equipment to find an access point that doesn't actively announce itself to the world .

Edit: it means you will have to manually add your wifi network to your devices by typing in the ssid on them but other than that there shouldn't be any issues

One option could be to get one of those 5G modems. It would require you to pay for your own Internet service, but many will then provide an Ethernet connection as an option, meaning you would never have to accept the legal terms presented to you. You could even use Wi-Fi because technically you never agreed to the terms, and practically speaking so many devices generate Wi-Fi networks I think it would be hard to enforce that you don’t produce any networks. Printers, smart watches, IP cameras… Are they really going to wardrive and triangulate the position of wireless devices on a regular basis? A sneaky network named after a printer or hidden SSID combined with ignorance for a TOS you never agreed to would probably slip through the cracks.

They don’t own the spectrum. I’m not sure it’s even legal to mandate that you can’t use Wi-Fi devices as long as you’re not using their network. When I was in university, there were still tons of such devices emitting signals that weren’t connected to the university network despite policy.

I'm in a similar situation. Before I had to move all was fine, I had a single ethernet port I plugged my router into. It even had a static IPv4 (even though no IPv6 but I could just use tunnelbroker). Literally perfect.

After I moved I'm now stuck in this horribly designed network that has a stupid internet cafe tier login portal even for wired devices, unencrypted wifi, seemingly every single device from every student on the same network (I am getting blasted with other people's broadcast packets and I'm pretty sure the network congestion from that is where my weird intermittent packet loss comes from). And now I don't have any public IP address at all.

Whoever they hired to set this up is an absolute moron who has no idea about network security or how to make an efficient network and considering the internet cafe login portal probably likes to cause as much suffering as possible. (Not saying I'm necessarily qualified but the fact alone that I can connect to other people's AirPlay devices means they failed at both.)

And the reason all of this is a problem is that they also don't allow putting a router/firewall in front so I can get a sane network. Had to tear down pretty much all the infrastructure I set up in the old place because a lot of it was relying on me having control over the network. Of course, I knew none of this before I moved in, I was explicitly looking for internet shenanigans in the contract.

I now have a janky Wireguard mesh network setup with one of the machines being the IPv6 gateway. Awful but at least I have public addresses and IPv6 (and with that a bit of my own network space) again.

I think a lot of the suggestions here pretty solid; you can essentially do them all. I ran a similar setup, but it was not double NAT just data capped so I had to toggle my MAC every now and then.

If you do introduce a switch from the wall, you can at least get your gaming devices directly on. You can then run Wifi network off the router for your phone, and WiVRn.

As others have mentioned though these terms are there for security, your WiFi is a risk to the network. If the school is on your side and you are prepared to mitigate that risk by keeping the router updated and choosing strong auth, you could even tune the transmit power and rssi drop off but I have a feeling if they understood you were going to run WiFi and not just a switch they also would have said no.

So this setup could put you at risk of losing internet I guess according to those terms