There's been a lot of fuss in the media lately about people "stealing" internet access from unsecured wireless networks. Personally, it wouldn't bother me to share some of my bandwidth when I'm not using it, but when I am using it, I'd like my traffic to get priority, since I'm the one paying for it.

Most broadband routers with any kind of security have the ability to restrict access to a list of known computers, identifying them by the MAC addresses encoded in their network adapters. How hard would it be to add a new rule to the router that allows unknown computers access to the network, but gives priority access to computers that are known? Quality-of-Service (QoS) features for giving priority access based on higher-layer  ;protocols such as Voice Over IP have been around for years.

Linksys, if you're listening, it's something to think about...