Comcast To Expand Public WiFi Using Home Internet Connections

Bob the Super Hamste writes "The St. Paul Pioneer press is reporting that Comcast is planning on expanding its network of public WiFi hot spots in the Twin Cities area by using home internet connections and user's WiFi routers. Customers will be upgraded to new wireless routers that will have 2 wireless networks, one for the home users and one for the general public. Subscribers to Comcast's Xfinity service and customers that participate in the public WiFi program will be allowed free access to the public WiFi offered by this service. Non Comcast customers get 2 free sessions a month each lasting 1 hour with additional sessions costing money. The article mentions that a similar service already exists and is provided by the Spain-based company Fon."

Comments

How about no

[YrWrstNtmr]

Does no work for you?

Many, many issues abound here. How secure is the separation between the two networks? What protections do I have in case of someone using my connection maliciously? How will this affect my total bandwidth and speed?

let me get this straight.

[Anonymous Coward]

So Comcast is selling people bandwidth and then reselling that bandwidth through the customers location? Reselling that bandwidth using customers electricity?

Thank you, no thanks.

Overrated?

[drinkypoo]

OK, so it's not the best comment ever, but it's a fact that you can't just go to one website for all the devices supported by some variant of tomato. The plethora of tomato variants means chasing around the web to figure out which flavor[s] will even support your hardware, and if they have the features you need. DD-WRT (or for that matter OpenWRT) provides a single website which permits a quick compatibility check. DD-WRT in particular has extensive and well-indexed installation instructions for specific hardware. Tomato has none of that. If you don't think that's useful information, by all means, mod this comment "Overrated" as well.