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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."
In the UK BT does this. Their customers can use any of the hotspots for free and everyone else has to pay, no free hour.
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?
Great idea. My neighbor keeps changing his password. This would be a lot easier.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why you buy your own router instead of renting one from the cable provider.
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.
Aside from the trust issues mentioned elsewhere, the other thing I don't like about this is that it'll flood the neighborhood with even more 2.4 GHz clutter.
5 GHz is not a panacea; it's astonishingly poor at penetrating walls, to the point that I treat my 5 GHz AP as only useful in the same room.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
That all depends. Don't know about Comcast, but both my local providers, the modem and the router are the same thing. They are a combined device. Not even sure you can get separate ones anymore.
But don't you also get the service to use for yourself? It seems like a superficially fair trade-off, though, it very well may not be.
What if this technology leads to the obsolescence of the standard cell-phone plan? Why pay an additional $75/mo (or whatever you pay these days, I haven't had a cell phone in years) when you can just have your own non-cellphone Android device that can piggy back on readily available WiFi to make phone calls and sends texts with VOIP? That's basically what I do now. I have a $50/mo 4g mobile hotspot and use my Android "MP3" player for Google Voice. My internet works all around the city I live in (and is stretching to the suburbs fairly well also) so I usually have a number that people can reach me at. The latency doesn't provide the cleanest of voice calls, but then again, I don't really care. If you need to get a hold of me, leave me a voice mail and I will get back to you (from a land-line at work, etc). I don't like being expected to answer a phone call 24/7.
Someone flopped a steamer in the gene pool.
So the customers get a kick back?
Yes. The kick back is that you get to use all the other wifi hotspots that are setup the same way by other customers for free (or, as part of your package). It actually seems like a decent little "give some, get a lot back" type of setup, except the part where they allow random users that aren't contributing hotspots to the system (but they do charge them and, at least hypothetically, that could be going towards maintenance/bandwidth/etc**).
** no, I'm not naive. This is the part they want to profit off of. The mutual agreement to share wifi networks could have been setup by anyone without a carriers involvement, or they could have set it up without an additional profit motivation, but that's not the case. This gives them a selling point; it keeps people from putting money into other networks pockets (keep them on comcast networks); it widens their grasp; it's a cheap grab at a potentially giant amount of wifi hotspots for nearly free; and it's a potential money maker on people that aren't participating; and later one, they can flip the switch and upcharge existing customers.
so you want me to host their equipment, maintain their equipment, protect their equipment, power their equipment, and house their equipment, all while they profit from that equipment and don't pay me any rent? Really? That's the plan? Free real estate? Even worse, I'm paying them for their service that I do use?
No.
Oh wait, do I get to monitor the traffic, and sell whatever I find? Or are they the only ones who can do that?
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
All major ISP do that in France since they installed triple-play boxes at customers home. The box does cable/DSL access with TV and phone over IP, and is also a WiFi router. Once you have an ISP controlled WiFi installation at each customer house, it is easy to provide the hotspot service.
The article addresses some of those things. They are separate networks and I'm guessing the public one is NATed further upstream. They claim that it will be safe, secure and there's no legal liability if somebody does something bad on the public network through your modem. I think it is a rather clever way to instantly have coverage where high densities of people already are. But, I'd certainly want an opt-out option available as a consumer. Comcast, btw, already firewalls a laundry list of ports (as I discovered a few weekends ago after an 'update' which broke my email amongst other things... for "my protection".) I'm guessing they probably do even more on the public network.
You aren't liable for *somebody else's* illegal activity on your modem.
You certainly are for your own and remember you have to authenticate if you want to use more than two sessions per month. Being that it is a public network, I imagine all net neutrality goes out the window. They might only allow two services: web and email, and all packet poking/peeking is fair game.
If they find lots of illegal activity coming through your modem the police wouldn't flinch to issue a search warrant at your front door. But, don't worry if it wasn't you. It will be you spouse, child, roommate, etc. who will go to jail after the police haul all the computer equipment in your home away as evidence.