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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.
There had better be a way for them to opt out of this, or there'll be trouble.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!
so much like FON/BTOpenzone or whatever they're called this week
Just like BT (and others) do with their FON system? Provided it doesn't slow down the connection's owner and (big ask) is completely isolated from the subscriber's network then who cares?
Ah, price teiring... Isn't there a bit of an issue with that?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Hah, as if you could get a signal from a Virgin Media router more than 10 metres away!
This is what happens when you don't own the router yourself. Virgin will use it, and their connection that they also rent to you, to make money on other services.
Hopefully 0.5Mbps will not saturate the shared cable connection! Performance is bad enough already, and I'm meant to get 60mbps.
I don't want passers by being able to connect to my home router with the hope that virgin's software is secure enough to maintain a distinction between private and public networks.
I currently already have my superhub (official virgin router/modem combo) in modem mode and use my own routers/access points/switches etc for my home network. So I suppose if this isn't easily disabled, I can always give my superhub a tin foil hat so none of its pesky public wifi signals seep out.
I use mac filter as my white list as the last measure of defense. This way most zero day exploits will have to spoof white listed MAC to even start exploiting. This is one extra step for someone wardriving my WiFi.
With public WiFi like this? You already in, so you are free to exploit the heck out of any vulnerability or misconfiguration. This is one exploit away from entire network getting turned into a botnet.
Comcast turns 50,000 paying customer homes into public hotspots, millions more by the end of the year.
http://www.extremetech.com/com...
Nah must have just been my imagination.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Vodafone already does this in the UK. Router modems have a public wifi hotspot and a private one. I would hope they got the security, throttling & auditing right so that the external user cannot be mistaken for the internal one or steal all their bandwidth.
Pros
* A malicious freeloader is less likely to attempt to compromise secured networks if a free alternative is available.
* Utilities often exercise eminent domain (at least where I live) to obtain the property rights necessary to deliver their infrastructure, or they place their infrastructure on public property. Since the public is sacrificing property rights to the ISP, it'd be nice if we could get some public Internet access in return.
Cons:
* If I own a router, I should have say as to who can access it. I think if the ISP is going to provide public access via a router/AP, they need to own it or compensate the owner.
* If I provide electricity to power ISP infrastructure, I need to be compensated for that.
I like this notion of openness.
Everyone benefits from public hotspots.
I even do it myself. I have 1Gbps Internet service and I carve out 100Mbps and offer it as an open wifi network in my apartment building.
My eyes reflect the stars and a smile lights up my face.
If you ever want to do bad, illegal things; you could connect to the free, public part of your router and torrent away. Sure it'd be slow (0.5M) but you can probably leave it always on.
Or for a more elaborate set up, connect to all your neighbour's public wifi networks at the same time and split your shenanigans between them.
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.
I'm worried about my door getting kicked in when somebody browsed kiddy porn through my network. Or fending off an **AA lawsuit because they downloaded the latest Adam Sandler epic
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In Comcast's case, they rolled out the PAY-to-use Wi-Fi hotspots using paying customer's routers.Performance is spotty, and sometimes their GD routers kick off my access point so my internet fails.
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
This is fine as long as I can't be prosecuted for the child porn that Joe Random User downloads through my router. And as long as it doesn't suck all my bandwidth up or infect my PC or slow it to a crawl or if it's susceptible to hacking or inclusion into a botnet.
On second thought, no, just no. You can't use my router for crap like this.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
My ISP's modem/router does this so I just plugged in my own router and grounded their antenna inside a tinfoil faraday cage. Screw the MBAs working at my ISP.
Set up fake hotspot and collect shatever data you want. Offer upfake sign on screen for web sites.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
One of the ISPs in Switzerland did this but for paying customers. It's an opt-in system. If you opt your router into the pool then you are free to use other's routers when you're out and about. I believe each router has two radios: one is the private and one the public.
soylentnews.org
As a VM subscriber, I don't see this as such a bad thing...
Virgin Media are going to have so many people hammering on these home routers, that any security holes are going to get discovered and made public before long. And if they refuse to fix, and then some shithead comes and does something illegal on my router, then I can just say to the police "these things have public unfixed security holes, don't look at me!".
So I'll bet that any security issues won't be a problem for long. Virgin, being the publicity/marketing whores they are, won't risk the bad publicity if they can manage it.
It's not as if this idea is exactly unknown, though the outfit I know of (and subscribe to) that's doing it right, Karma, now only gives 100 megabytes for free, then you have to pay for more. (Though if you use your personal referral code, anyone who buys a hotspot saves with it $10, and you get $10, too. Thanks to a couple of blog posts, I've earned nearly $400 worth of free WiFi so far.)
That being said, 100 megabytes is more than enough for someone to hook up for long enough to check his email, do a little social networking, and so on. And they give it to you at the full 4G LTE super-speed. not some super-throttled you-really-should-pay-us-if-you-want-it-faster scheme.
The one problem with the scheme is that the public nature of it means you don't get the benefit of password encryption on your WiFi. But VPNs are pretty cheap these days.
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I would imagine not. However, Virgin Media customers are going to be paying substantially more for their service than the extra electricity cost, so I don't think that's going to be a major problem and there is the opt-out if that is a problem to you.
As a Virgin Media customer myself, I think this is a good thing and am perfectly happy with footing the electricity cost (not that I've worked out what that is) if it provides a useful service. Then again, I've been running my wifi router with a secondary unencrypted network for years anyway. It saves giving out keys to friends and I think of it as a kind of pay-it-forwards thing - there's times when I'd want to have access to a free wifi network.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
I would offer specific billing credit for bandwidth lent out for public access; that way, subscribers would be incentivized to actually improve public access to their routers.
All that will do is incentivize users to connect to the free public wifi instead of their own network when they do not need the bandwidth or even run simple scripts to generate public traffic while they use their own network for everything else.
How is that relevant? I pay for a phone and data service that gives me very good coverage.
How much are you paying for gigabytes of data that you could shift to a cable company's public hotspot, either immediately or by waiting a reasonable time until you're in coverage?
Xfinity wants me to pay to run their infrastructure for a network that gives me zero net gain over what I already have.
In theory, the "net gain" would be dollars that you don't have to pay to your 4G carrier because you are using Xfinity Wi-Fi instead.
Do you really think they are going to share your network retard? Clearly any user on the WiFi network will have their own IP address.
Even if they have a separate IP address the question is will the ISP records indicate that it was assigned to your router? If they do how confident are you that the police will be aware of the distinction between the public and private IP addresses and understand that the activity had nothing to do with you? In fact, even if they are aware of the difference, they may still want to investigate you in case it was you connecting to the public side of your WiFi so the activity was not directly linked back to you.
I'm still baffled as to why companies think this is a good idea. What the fuck good is a jumble of WiFi hot spots in residential areas. So you cover 150 foot radius around your home and that helps next to no one. I have no interest in allowing some stranger to sit in front of my house to get internet access. If my neighbors want internet, they can get their own. There seems to be some misconception that WiFi is going to work somehow like a cell phone network where enough cells in proximity give broad coverage. This scheme does next to nothing to give WiFi coverage to the public areas in most places where society might actually get some benefit. Please just drop all these fucked off WiFi schemes and don't pretend it's OK to use a service I pay for so that others can get a benefit.
Well, this is happening here in Greece for the last year. OTE the main telecom company owned by Deutsze Telecom has been implementing a similar semi-open wifi to the subscribers by using their 2nd SSID on their latest routers. The architecture is based on a mixed firmware, partly OTE custom depending on router (ZTE, Huawei) and partly on a FON (la fonera) rural network setup. The service itself is free of charge (for the time beeing) as long you opt in and have a valid A/VDSL account. It has a 2Mbps, 1Gb cap by default on each connected account that successfully connects throught the captive portal. Most customes don't even know how to use it.
Roses are red, violets are blue, most poems rhyme, but this one doesn't...
To my knowledge, FON was the first to provide this kind of service many years ago, and since then many ISPs in many countries have done so. Here in France, all major ISPs provide this kind of service, and I assume it is the same in other countries. We would have heard about it for long if there was any security problem associated. So I wonder why this even makes a Slashdot news, and please, please, stop make FUD about this. It reminds of 19e century people fearing driving more than 25 km/h and others being doubtful about the Edison phonograph.
I'm getting 20Mbits/sec on a connection that is supposed to be 152Mbits/sec.
It's been like it for months, and they've put back the fix date from June to OCTOBER.
Disgusting service from Virgin Media. Liberty Global have been an utter disaster.
.... really.
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