Slashdot Mirror
Virgin Media Starts Turning Customer Routers Into Public Wi-Fi Hotspots (arstechnica.co.uk)
UK ISP Virgin Media is expanding its public Wi-Fi network by co-opting customers' home routers as hotspots. Only the most recent router design (the SuperHub v3) will be recruited at first, and customers can opt-out from the program if they wish. Virgin says the change will have "no impact on customers" because affected homes will be allocated extra bandwidth. ArsTechnica offers more context: A little background: a couple of years ago, Virgin Media started trialling a public Wi-Fi service very similar to "BT Wi-Fi with FON," where residential BT customers have their routers turned into hotspots. For some reason the broad rollout of Virgin's service was delayed until now. There are some curious differences between BT and Virgin Media's approach, though. For starters, it seems only Virgin Media customers will have access to this nationwide Wi-Fi network; BT grants free access to BT customers, but non-customers can pay for access ($5 per hour). The owner of that subverted hotspot doesn't get any of the money, of course. Furthermore, while BT customers must share their ADSL or VDSL bandwidth with any public Wi-Fi users, Virgin Media promises that "your home network is completely separate from Virgin Media WiFi traffic, meaning the broadband connection you pay for is exclusively yours, and just as secure."
Who doesn't trust their consumer grade router to handle this traffic appropriately?
I foresee the day a Jehovah's witness comes to my door asking if I can power cycle my router.
4G is now good enough that it's just not worth the hassle of connecting to unreliable WiFi hotspots, and losing connection every time you go out of range. Do they even support seamless connection handover as you walk down the street ?
Does the ISP assume liability if someone uses your Wi-Fi for illegal purposes?
Concast and Brighthouse were doing the same shit.
Nice job on that.
Comcast already does this. If you use one of their modems/routers instead of providing your own, the router establishes two networks, one your provide WIFI network, the other a Comcast Xinfiniti (or whatever they call it) network that provides free access to Comcast subscribers (or partners among some of the other cable cartel folks). It's pretty convenient: I can have wifi access pretty much anywhere in my city, even while riding the bus, through the service. I don't play along at home, since I use my own cable modem and router, but I enjoy the benefits while out and about in the city. I also don't have a cell phone, so I only use wifi on my tablet and laptop - if I had a cell phone, the wifi coverage would probably make much less sense to me, but I refuse to be reachable 24-7.
I don't get why TFS has all that "subverted hotspot" snark. Virgin is just adopting an idea that's turned out to be very convenient in the communities where it's already operating. I know it's fashionable to hate ISPs, but this seems like a helpful step forward.
The setting to turn it off is in the router/modem box. Not a big deal.
I do not use ISP Routers. Only a Modem. (the Modem acts as a PPPoE Bridge, it used to be an ATM Bridge, but now its a PPPoE Bridge.) and my Routers all run DD-WRT. I don't trust ISP Routers and neither should you.
Nah, already done.
Fight Spammers!
'"no impact on customers" because affected homes will be allocated extra bandwidth'
You know, except for the increase power consumption, which the customer pays for, and the increase in wifi interference. Even if very small it's still an impact.
Comcast has been pulling this scam for quite some time now. Turn your private network into one that is accessible by other Comcast users via a second wifi access point built into the modem/router. This consumes your bandwidth (even if they allow you more, there is still a limit on your network segment), your electricity, and your wifi spectrum. It also installs a gaping security hole in your private network.
The real kicker is they still charge you outrageous amounts to lease the modem/router.
Over here ziggo (since the merger with UPC, part of liberty global) did the same and it sure did impact performance. Something something firmware something cisco something b0rked. Someone'd connect using the public SSID and performance of the entire cisco docsis modem would go through the floor, then stay that way until reset. Even the wired part was affected. Thanks, ziggo and cisco.
A relative of mine lives in West Seattle, on a hill overlooking some city property that has become a notorious hobo jungle. Homeless advocates have been pushing for Internet access in some of these locations. His reactions was "No way am I making my back yard more attractive for the bums. Please help me replace the CL router with one I can secure."
Have gnu, will travel.
For the radio too? How do they pull *that* off?
Bandwidth when it is not in use.
You should get something.
Optimum has been doing this for years already:
https://www.optimum.net/internet/hotspots/
Apologies to US readers, but Virgin are busy suing our health service: http://healthcaretimes.co.uk/v... so I'm boycotting anything that has the Virgin label, airlines, sport, fibre etc. etc.
This particular thing is ridiculous, invasive and potentially full of infosec/legal problems too. Just don't.
On y va, qui mal y pense!
Why even get the Comcast router?
Every year or two when I burn through another one, they are quick to give me the super router which does everything.. then I send them to the backroom to bring me one that lacks wifi.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Or does Virgin Media have a way around the laws of physics?
I run my 'superhub' in modem only mode because i trust my asus router far more than it but if this is their intention i might need to start stocking up on some wood, foil and copper wire to build a faraday cage around it in the event opting out 'accidentally' doesn't work or is impossibly complicated to perform.
My IP address is, to the courts at least, analogous to my identity. I won't let anybody use my connection under any circumstances.
Currently, I live in an apartment, with >12 visible WiFi networks. That means my WiFi connections are often quite poor due to overuse of the same frequencies. I can only imagine how poor my reception would become if these 12 WiFi routers were each acting as 2 WiFi hotspots.
I've allowed those who are in range (effectively no one due to the thickness of walls) side access through my BT router for years. Far from it being "subverted", it was a conscious choice on my part; sign up for BT FON, use wireless hotspots around the globe for free. As I live in a residential area, the likelihood of someone parked by my house hoping for an open hotspot is remote, plus I'm not such a bandwidth hog that my connection is saturated 24/7. In any case, the guest network gets what's left over. Thus it was an easy decision to make.
I don't see the point of the Virgin Media version. It has the same limitations but no benefit to the customer.
"Wait. Something's happening. It's opening up! My God, it's full of apricots!"
there's a snowball's chance in hell the ISP is going to pay your legal fees if you get sued/imprisoned because somebody used your router to pull MP3s, movies or worse, child porn. IIRC the UK doesn't have Juries so you might (_might_) have a better chance. Here in the States unless you're tall, good looking and personable you almost always plea bargain because our juries are so damn unpredictable. That and ridiculous mandatory sentencing guidelines that prevent judges from overriding juries at sentencing time. That's why we've got like a 90% conviction rate.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
yup or stop paying rent and get your own.
What is this, 2003? Come on, that is ridiculous. Also, does anyone really care about wifi in this day and age of mobile data? If they had actually joined FON, I would be thrilled, but otherwise this is pretty pointless.
I don't trust DD-WRT. It's a pile of shit and they lock down the software via digital restrictions for some routers. I shouldn't have to download 17GB to build the software either and then have it fail to build where the solution to solve the problem is "try it again till it works". Whats so bloody f'd up about DD-WRT that you have to do this?
OpenWRT is a bit better, but still is a nightmare security wise, and contains proprietary bits due to near all wifi routers being dependent on various chipsets which are dependent on proprietary bits, and without them the routers won't have support for wifi/ADSL/modem components.
LibreCMC is the best choice, but it is limited to s handful of routers. In part due to FCC regulations (and that is true of DD-WRT and OpenWRT now too). It doesn't run on any of the major shitty routers. It runs on some major routers, just not the shitty ones.
Yes, the cell companies care because they have much higher availability on the backbone vs cell transport
The exit / entry point for data is going to be that specific router in your home, regardless of what logical separation of traffic is going on.
As a result, if $shady_user is doing something stupid while connected to that device, all eyes are going to be on the owner or location of said device.
We all know LE doesn't grasp the concept of " an IP address isn't an individual ", nor does it stop them from kicking down doors authorized via a warrant. ( Warrants always specify a specific address / location. If it doesn't, it isn't valid. )
They only know where the hardware resides, thus that's usually where they're headed with guns, battering rams, attitude and itchy trigger fingers.
Technical explanations to the contrary while at gunpoint and / or in handcuffs are lost on folks whose expertise is limited to which end of the gun should be pointed at bad guy.
No thank you.
> Nobodies door got kicked in and nobody was in any legal trouble. The FBI IT
> team contacted us and took a look, that was it. Nobody had guns to their heads.
Do you think the FBI would've been just as polite to Joe Sixpack?
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
And plug it back in in the morning.
It's still using your electricity to run their business.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
With the increased bandwidth (and presumably the Wi-fi listening on a new, second channel?), would this increase the electricity usage of the router? It might only be pennies a day, but still the customer has to pay more to support someone else's Wi-fi connection as well as their own...
Explains exactly why they fobbed a Superhub 3 in my direction, with threat of disconnection at the end of this month if I didn't upgrade my old Modem to it.
Of course, I'm running it in modem mode anyway so this shouldn't affect me, but, trust them? I think not...there's a Faraday cage lurking around somewhere in the loft from the old days of testing RF gear with the things name on it, failing that, I've so many old PC cases kicking around I'm sure I can rig one up to perform a similar function.
On a side note, I'm sure there'll be a lot of people out there having 'fun' spoofing VM pubic(sic) WiFi nodes and getting up to all sorts of japery...
Think about it.
You look at anything illegal and you've got plausible deniability.
And you cant be blamed for the browsing habits of others since the hotspot doesn't even belong to you.
Moving to a better router? DD-WRT isn't as updated as it should be these days and has slow performance. Modern consumer routers are fast because they use packet acceleration tech built in to their chips. DD-WRT doesn't know how to do that (at least not that I've ever seen).
So what I recommend for geek types is go to three devices: Modem -> router -> wireless. You can repurpose your existing router as a WAP, or get a purpose built WAP. Either way, you don't do routing on it. Then get a purpose built router.
My top recommendation is a Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Lite. About $100 for a little wired 3-port device that'll pass a gig of traffic with low latency since it has packet acceleration and knows how to use it. It's a bit on the complex side and you can't do all setup through the GUI (IPv6 requires commandline work) but it is powerful, and they are pretty good at updating it. Runs a customized version of VyOS and provides you with access to all the low level stuff. You can compile your own shit for it if you like (is MIPS64 though).
If that isn't to your taste my second choice is PFSense. You can run that on anything x86 but the devices they sell on their site, made by Netgate, are great choices. Its more expensive to hit a gigabit speed because it runs all in software, and that also means its latency is higher. However that said I like the interface better and it is an exceedingly powerful and flexible firewall. It's updated regularly, you can buy professional support, and since it is software you can run it on anything, including a VM. Runs BSD underneath and you can get access to the low level if you want to mess with it.
Third choice would be a something like a Cisco RV340 or maybe RV320. It's the same general hardware as the EdgrRouter Lite, a Cavium Octeon processor which is MIPS64+packet processing, but with Cisco's OS whacked on. Easier to use overall, though not as flexible. Cisco tends to be ok with security updates. They use a slower CPU and less RAM so you aren't going to get a full gig, but they are pretty fast and are nice and low latency. Not too bad price wise either, like $150 for the RV320.
Don't really see why consumers should be forced to rent a router and also pay for the electricity so that non-residents can have wifi.
Also, almost all wifi routes have security vulnerabilities, so even if they say it is separated, that is BS is only a statement to trick consumers into thinking that they are safe.
French major operators have been doing this country-wide for years. At least the experience can help calming down nervous users.
Comcast and multiple other cable companies are doing this in the US, and the biggest issue I'm aware of is that the boxes that they put in to do this apparently draw enough power that it adds up over the course of the year. They can get away with it in part because the capacity of the coax coming into your house or office is so high that you're not paying for all of it anyway, so the hotspot shouldn't have any impact on your available bandwidth.
The problem with what's described in this article is that they're doing it on DSL lines which are almost always bandwidth-restricted anyway, meaning that by having this enabled you're both paying for their hotspot's power consumption and getting poorer service for it.
Sounds like a loser proposition to me.
fencepost
just a little off
Got out of bed this morning, usual shower, get dressed, go downstairs.. letter sat on the doormap. It's from Virgin Media informing of this change, and including a URL that I can apparently use to opt out.
No information on how or why this might benefit me, as a customer.
I'll opt out.
Comcast has been doing that for years. If you don't want it, the easiest workaround is to supply your own router rather than using one of theirs. They'll still let you do that for now.