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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.
I'm a virgin media customer. You can opt out, in which case you can't use the free wifi access.
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, 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.
Well, I would think it depends on how they do it - in Switzerland, Cablecom does the same - as a subscriber you get one of their routers, and apart from your own connection (which you get at the full advertised speed), there is another channel using which they turn your modem into a "free" wifi hotspot.
The catch in this case comes with the word "free" - it is free to their paying subscribers: i.e. at home I have my own connection, but everywherelse in Switzerland, within wifi distance from any of their other customer's cable routers, I can access the internet through wifi at no extra cost.
Non-subscribers do not get access to this wifi...
In this case, my "reason to pay" them is for the (better) access I have for myself at home but it also includes the convenience of having free wifi across many places in Switzerland...
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.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
With the BT one, if you enable it on their router and then swap for your own router, your access remains. Sssshhhh
I'm all for jumping on the good, old-fashioned Comcast hate train when it's deserved (like my increasingly saturated 105M cable connection that struggles to provide 50-60 during peak periods), but please explain to me how someone running the Xfinity hotspot on their router makes them have a "really vulnerable wifi connection"?
There are two separate networks being broadcast from the access point. One, which connects to the customer's LAN, is available for the owner to use at full speed. The other, which does not connect to the internal LAN, only to the outside world, and is rate limited to ensure full performance of the customer's provisioned speed and is available to outside users. Outside users must authenticate using their Xfinity credentials to connect. These credentials are logged, so if any nefarious activity originates from the connection it will be attributed to it's rightful owner.
The internal network is still password protected (well, as protected as any wireless network can be, I suppose) so no one will be connecting to your private network.
I agree that the Xfinity hotspot should be opt-in because it uses electricity and adds extra RF to what is usually an already noisy spectrum band, but this in no way, shape, or form, makes your wifi connection "really vulnerable". No more vulnerable that wifi already is, anyway. Stop fear-mongering.
I may be wrong, but what it looks like to me is: if you're a Virgin customer and you don't opt out you get to use the network at 10Mbps. If you're not a virgin customer or you opt out (because really, how are they going to be able to tell that random mobile device X belongs to an opted-out virgin user and not a random member of the public?) you're limited to the 0.5Mbps rate.