1 In 3 Home Routers Will Be Used As Public Wi-Fi Hotspots By 2017

An anonymous reader writes: Juniper Research predicts that at least 1 in 3 home routers will be used as public Wi-Fi hotspots by 2017, and that the total installed base of such dual-use routers will reach 366 million globally by the end of 2020. Major broadband operators such as BT, UPC and Virgin Media in Europe and several of the biggest cable TV operators in the U.S. such as Comcast and Cablevision have adopted the homespot model as a low-cost way of rapidly expanding their domestic Wi-Fi coverage.

Comments

Re:No Thanks

[rsborg]

Even if the telecoms are not counting the public hotspot use against my caps, it could impact the performance of my network.

But mainly, it's the desire not to attract certain elements into my neighborhood who depend on free services. I wish I could find a pic of the hobo sitting in front of his tent in the 'Seattle Jungle' camp pecking away at his Apple laptop. Probably mooching off a local business' unsecured WiFi. It was run on the local news during a report on some recent drug murders there.

In our case, we used to have random folks hanging out on the curb near our house (sometimes late at night playing loud music), then I took a bat to my "xfinitywifi" cable modem/router, and bought a device that did not have wifi capabilities.
I still saw the "xfinitywifi" and people still randomly parked in front of my house.
I told my neighbors who are also annoyed by these interlopers, we all replaced our modems... and now no more jerks in our neighborhood (for the past several months) - and bonus - no rental fee for each of our cable subscriptions.