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At a school I used to attend, we were told by our instructors that connecting our laptops to the network via ethernet was against their computer use policy, and apparently resulted in some tech person coming to the classrooms on a few occasions.

My question pertains to reasons why ethernet might be prohibited for students.

I can't imagine it would be security related, because of the abundance of ethernet ports around the buildings, including the clients in the computer labs and such that are connected by ethernet. If it has to with some kind of network interference, are there any situations where some kind of mitigation really isn't possible?

Clarification: Lab computers were connected with ethernet, and we could use them without issue. For laptops, we were required to use Wifi.

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I can guess a few possible reasons - is that the wired network might have been kept seperate from the wireless reasons, possibly using a different subnet or authentication method. The other is well, they simply don't want you to - especially if someone disconnects a more important device for a quick fix. It happens.

AUP/Computer usage policy isn't always technically driven. It could be as simple as 'We can't be bothered to keep an eye on the wired network' or "We don't want people using these jacks cause we say so"

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