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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."
When I signed up for Comcast Business Class recently, they told me I had to use their modem+wireless router combo.
I managed to put their modem in bridge mode (i.e. let me use my own router) and "disable" the wireless functionality so I can use my own access points, but I can't seem to find any way to disable the damn public network.
I've confirmed that the public network uses a different public IP (clients connected to it get a private IP), but I'd still like to be able to disable it.
Bastards.
"a blog post about the increased electricity costs, where they conclude it's about $8 per year in the mid-Atlantic area -- if it's being used."
And this suit is being filed in CALIFORNIA, where the price of power is much higher.
Next off. That modem isn't secure. Man can make it, man can and will break it. Period. You guys thought the latest TLS was the bees knees against POODLE and BEAST and BAM someone just said "We can act like it never fucking existed" in an article on this site, not even two days ago.
"Comcast could give everyone a $1/mo credit for enabling the Xfinity WiFi Hotspot, completely eliminating the issue."
And make up for it with bullshit fees, tariffs, taxes, and still never apply the credit.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
As long as Comcast lets me share my cable TV with all my friendly neighbors as well. Since we're all in the sharing mood...
Wrap aluminum foil around it - to block the signal?
..........FULL STOP.
This is exactly what it means. And to be honest what you have is unusual.
Every connection has to come back to a main trunk line. That main trunk will have a current max bandwidth which has to be split between all users on that trunk. So if your main trunk is 10gig the combined speed of everyone on that trunk cannot exceed 10gig no matter how big their fast their final connection is. An easy way to control this is to limit the speeds of the final pipe. If I give you all 20mbit I can fit lots of customers onto the trunk.
They also however model average user behaviour. So they know that shortly after the kids get home from school the demand will peak and users at that time will be most sensitive to latency as they all jump into COD. From this they will know that their peak demand equates to on 40% of their sold bandwidth so they will then oversell their capacity. So instead of only selling 10gig of bandwidth they will sell 22gig and be reasonable confident that they will not hit the pipes limit too often. That is call a contention ratio of 1. Most isps however, and certainly the more dodgy ones will oversell WAY past a ratio of 1. Meaning at peak times your internet will crawl.
So in the end you having the ability to suck at the system limits is unusual because of the implications that has on the rest of the network. You may decide to grab an entire debian repository mirror and in the process completely clog the back haul pipe.
That's right, when I had Earthlink, they broke into my house once day and installed and turned on the rou... WAIT, THEY DIDN'T.
Sorry, when I had AT&T they hacked into my network and reprogrammed my wireless router to... WAIT, THEY DIDN'T.
Sorry, what I meant was, when I had Comcast, they sent a letter saying that if I used one of their routers they were enabling this new feature. Of course, this feature didn't apply to me because I had my own router, which is an option all Comcast users have. Also at worst, if I got a customer service idiot who informed my otherwise, as some are claiming here has happened to them, I also have the option of canceling and going with someone else.
So actually, yes, Comcast's customers consent to this. They may not proactively seek it, but they do consent by deciding to use Comcast's equipment rather than their own.
BTW, I also think xfinitywifi is a fucking awesome idea. No, really. If Comcast wants to give me some equipment for free that'd implement it (no, I still want to use my own Wifi router Comcast, so what you give me needs to be a box that can plug into a cable splitter or else has a cable pass-thru I can plug my DOCSIS3 modem into) I'll plug it in.
This is a nice way for customers to allow people to have Wifi access without having to give everyone access to their own networks. I like that idea. Slashdotters, who traditionally have hated it when people lock down their own routers as DESTROYING TEH FREEDUMB you'd have thought would also be in favor of it.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
So it's ok to steal as long as you're stealing a little bit from lots of people?
Sure it's only up to $10 a month. But that doesn't make it right, and in fact, the amount stolen is small enough that mots people would eat the electricity bill because going to court is much more expensive. Hence a class-action lawsuit because stealing $1M from one person is just as bad as stealing $1 from 1M people. Just that those 1M people have far less recourse because the amount stolen is far lower. Do it right and a company can make billions by doing this.
Businesses often get rates cut if they set up a public hotspot using their Comcast account, which is why a lot of hotspots are in front of businesses. Why shouldn't home users get the same?