Virgin Media To Base a Public Wi-Fi Net On Paying Customers' Routers

An anonymous reader writes with a story that Virgin Media "announced this month its plans to roll out a free public WiFi network this autumn, using subscribers' personal routers and existing infrastructure to distribute the service across UK cities." And while regular customers' routers are to be the basis of the new network, the publicly viewable overlay would operate over "a completely separate connection," and the company claims subscribers' performance will not be hindered. Why, then, would customers bother to pay? For one thing, because the free version is slow: 0.5Mbps, vs. 10Mbps for Virgin's customers.

Comments

Re:Opt out

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm a virgin media customer. You can opt out, in which case you can't use the free wifi access.

Re:Opt out

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe try reading the article

"For those Virgin Media subscribers unhappy with the prospect of sharing their network connection, the company is offering an opt-out setting. Enabling this option however will, quite rightly, prohibit the subscriber from accessing other free WiFi spots – share and share alike etc."

So it works exactly like BT's fon service then. Nothing to see here.

"Free" did this in France

[GuB-42]

Free, a french ISP known to be highly disruptive to its competitors did this with its routers.
The hotspot is completely separated from the home network (different IP), on a lower priority, so it won't affect you. This hotspot is only available to Free customers that didn't chose to opt out. For me, that's fair.
Note that due to the way traffic is prioritized, the public hotspot becomes slow to the point of being unusable if the subscriber uses his connection intensively.

Re:Haven't I heard this before?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

If you don't have your own router/firewall between your LAN and Comcast's (or anyone else's) cable modem than you are vulnerable.

Want a quick demonstration? Call Comcast with an issue with their builtin router and watch as they are able to reset the passwords on the device and verify that all of the devices on the LAN are able to connect to it.

I kept the Xfinity wireless enabled. I use my own WiFi on my own firewall/router and see the potential of using the WiFi hotspots while traveling as greater than any imagined threats on my LAN.