Comcast is turning your Xfinity router into a public Wi-Fi hotspot

I hate big cable companies as much as the next person, but I really don&#x27;t have a problem with this as long as a few things are in place:<p>1) Network isolation, according to the article there is some isolation. Not sure what this means <i>exactly</i> but if it&#x27;s a private subnet routed to Comcast on a separate IP for security&#x2F;privacy reasons. There is no technical reason this can&#x27;t be accomplished. I do question how much Comcast (or their vendor) engineers care about security though.<p>2) Doesn&#x27;t affect my speed, article states this. Assuming it&#x27;s true, modern DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem can support an absurd amount of traffic, way more then most WiFi APs can handle at any reasonable range.<p>My biggest concern is that WiFi is already slow, if I&#x27;m streaming Netflix videos and it now starts to drop segments due to a person in a car on a tablet streaming the latest Gangnam style, I&#x27;ll be upset.

I hate Comcast. But I like this. FREE (french provider) has been doing so for years now. You router shares a <i>second</i> speed-limited connection which doesn&#x27;t slow down your own speed, and other Comcast members can connect to it with their pass.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s bad practices to not tell the customer or whatever, but now in Paris, if you are a FREE customer, there is literally WIFI everywhere for you. And it&#x27;s amazing.<p>just my 2cents :)

The article states that there is separate bandwidth allocated to the public wifi. I wonder if there is a way to bridge the two together? Say wired into your own and wireless into the public and get twice the bang for your buck.

Comcast is more than willing to allow you to have your own cable modem and will even assist you in setting it up. I did this recently when I drop phone service they were providing and no longer needed their special modem. So seven dollars a month charged for it became zero with my spending less than eighty dollars and ten minutes on the phone with their tech support.<p>My concern with their plan besides being opt-out is, who is liable for misuse of the signal?

This is quite scary. &quot;by default, the feature is being turned on without its subscribers’ prior consent. It’s an opt-out system&quot;.

So, setup your own router, call it &quot;xfinitywifi&quot; and collect Comcast login information all day?

Comcast is pretty solid. I know it tends to get a lot of hate but my experience has been fairly consistent.<p>Like some others have said, as long as it doesn&#x27;t screw around with my own connection, then it&#x27;s not a big deal. Plus I&#x27;ll now be able to access internet in a lot more places that didn&#x27;t have free Wi-Fi before. It&#x27;s really useful for me since I only have a 200mb data plan.

With all the hate that is going around right now for ISPs, it amazes me that they would roll something out like this.

At least they let customers to opt-out. In Malta (EU) there is an ISP called Melita - pretty much a monopoly - which enforced similar to all it&#x27;s customers without even informing them and without letting them to turn it off.<p>It&#x27;s an outrageous practice to enable radio-emitting devices in customer&#x27;s homes without their consent. Unfortunately, they didn&#x27;t see any backlash from the customer base, as most didn&#x27;t understand what happened and believed to what lies ISP published on their FAQ page - that additional WiFi spot doesn&#x27;t emit extra EMF and doesn&#x27;t consume extra electicity...<p>I had to go to the lengths of reversing modem firmware looking for exploits in order to disable this.

Good thing I bought and use my own router and modem. Although the interesting bit I noticed from the article was about the &#x27;additional bandwidth&#x27; that gets allotted. Meaning Comcast doesn&#x27;t let you use all of your bandwidth.

This sounds shady to me i mean if you&#x27;re a customer paying for a top tire internet connection that uses all the data capacity you line can give you how is it not affecting you when this starts serving other people?<p>The line must be able to handle more bandwidth but somehow i doubt ISP&#x27;s had the foresight to leave some extra for just this occasion.<p>Is the router even capable of handling the extra load this would introduce? Most consumer routers are known for being under powered.

They&#x27;ve been doing this -- at least here in Philadelphia -- for quite some time now. The idea is nice, I suppose: it&#x27;s nice to be able to walk around the city and have a wifi signal in most places. But the reality is, the connection is almost always so poor it almost never makes connecting worth my while, because it actually results in a POORER experience.

And what about those jurisdictions where you are responsible for file sharing that occurs on your network?

British Telecom has been doing this for quite a few years now as &quot;BT FON&quot;.

Solution: hack it, upside-down-ternet style: <a href="http://www.ex-parrot.com/pete/upside-down-ternet.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ex-parrot.com&#x2F;pete&#x2F;upside-down-ternet.html</a>

This has been in place in San Francisco for quite some time (at least a year, I believe, if not longer).<p>It seems like a great idea...for opening a giant MITM attack vector to anyone who chooses to use it.

I can login and connect to the xfinity wifi at home but, it never works when I try it at a public place. It seems like just another service they advertise but, does not work.

Just tried to opt-out. Took about 20 minutes because &quot;something is wrong, please try again later&quot;, rinse, repeat.<p>Finally I was able to do it, but now the page where you opt-in&#x2F;out won&#x27;t load so I can&#x27;t confirm (and of course my neighbors all have it enabled so I can&#x27;t tell if the network is mine or not).<p>Shameful but totally expected. ANY option for high speed internet would be better than this (except every other cable provider as they&#x27;re all just as bad).

I suspect this will have a major impact on file sharing lawsuits where your IP is used to identify you.

What I want to know is if this will count toward my 300gb data cap.

And 2.4 GHz continues to go to shit with 5 GHz close behind. It&#x27;s bad enough I can&#x27;t turn off the WiFi on my own (rented) modem without having to call someone and go through the rigmarole, now there&#x27;s a second network to deal with.