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Comcast Sued For Turning Home Wi-Fi Routers Into Public Hotspots
HughPickens.com writes: Benny Evangelista reports at the San Francisco Chronicle that a class-action suit has been filed in District Court in San Francisco on behalf of Toyer Grear and daughter Joycelyn Harris, claiming that Comcast is "exploiting them for profit" by using their home router as part of a nationwide network of public hotspots. Comcast is trying to compete with major cell phone carriers by creating a public Xfinity WiFi Hotspot network in 19 of the country's largest cities by activating a second high-speed Internet channel broadcast from newer-model wireless gateway modems that residential customers lease from the company.
Although Comcast has said its subscribers have the right to disable the secondary signal, the suit claims the company turns the service on without permission. It also places "the costs of its national Wi-Fi network onto its customers" and quotes a test conducted by Philadelphia networking technology company Speedify that concluded the secondary Internet channel will eventually push "tens of millions of dollars per month of the electricity bills needed to run their nationwide public Wi-Fi network onto consumers." The suit also says "the data and information on a Comcast customer's network is at greater risk" because the hotspot network "allows strangers to connect to the Internet through the same wireless router used by Comcast customers."
Although Comcast has said its subscribers have the right to disable the secondary signal, the suit claims the company turns the service on without permission. It also places "the costs of its national Wi-Fi network onto its customers" and quotes a test conducted by Philadelphia networking technology company Speedify that concluded the secondary Internet channel will eventually push "tens of millions of dollars per month of the electricity bills needed to run their nationwide public Wi-Fi network onto consumers." The suit also says "the data and information on a Comcast customer's network is at greater risk" because the hotspot network "allows strangers to connect to the Internet through the same wireless router used by Comcast customers."
Call their business tech support and ask them to disable the public wifi, the tier 1 support can't, but tier 2 can
Former comcast employee and Business Class customer here. They tell you that you have to use their modem so they can market VOIP phone service to you once it's installed. You can use any modem you want as long as it supports DOCSIS3. Go buy any DOCSIS3 modem and plug it in, then call them and tell them you want a modem swap.
You can opt out of the binding arbitration clause, not that they advertise this fact. I believe you're "supposed" to complete the form within 30 days of commencement of service, but I don't know whether or not that requirement itself is legally binding.
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
I've had good luck with the Motorola SB6141 DOCSIS 3.0 modem. (The SB6121 is apparently an obsolete model.) Eventually DOCSIS 3.1 modems will be available.
It took me an estimated 9 hours of communicating with Comcast representatives to get Comcast to bill at the advertised rate, instead of far more than Comcast advertises. This is what works: Call the Comcast executive offices at 215-640-8960. Be very polite and logical, but insistent.
Don't check your internet access speed with Speedtest.net. Apparently that web site always reports the advertised rate, the connection rate, not the data delivery rate. DSLReports Speed Test shows that I get one-seventh the speed Comcast advertises.
Comcast was the 2014 Worst Company In America.
Comcast has apparently found that most people don't spend the many hours Comcast makes it necessary to protest over-billing.
It's interesting to me that Comcast apparently expects employees to abuse customers, and Comcast employees hear that as permission to abuse Comcast, also.
Apparently the U.S. government no longer protects the people, but just allows any abuse that will make the rich richer, or allow the violent to be more violent.
Here in the Netherlands our largest cable providers (Ziggo and UPC) also turned every home cable modem into a public hotspot about a year or two ago. All customers are given an account to use the hotspot network anywhere in the country. It can be pretty handy if you are with a laptop in a city and need internet access. Your laptop will get get a connection and away you go. They are on separate IP space, and don't affect your usable bandwidth or throughput as they are lower priority traffic than your own subscription traffic. While this functionality is opt out rather than opt in, you can just login to the console of your cable modem and disable it as desired. When you opt out like that however you also lose the access to use hotspot network entirely. The cost of using the network is to participate. The only thing that I see wrong with it is that it is an opt out system rather than an opt in. But I can also see that something like this wouldn't reach the "critical mass" to make it all work otherwise.