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John Biggs writes at TechCrunch that Comcast is quietly turning on public hotspots in its customers' routers, essentially turning private homes into public hotspots. Comcast customers get free Wi-Fi wherever there is a Comcast box and the company gets to build out a private network to compete with telecoms. Fifty thousand users with Arris Touchstone Telephony Wireless Gateway Modems essentially basic modems that cable providers drop off at your home have already been turned into public hotspots in Houston, and there are plans to enable 150,000 more.
But concerns are being raised about this service. In addition to using customers' electricity for their service, some say that in areas that have lots of apartment buildings and multi-tenant dwellings within close proximity of one another, performance will slow down. Those routers are transmitting on the same channels for their 2.4GHz and 5GHz signals, leading to RF competition. "Comcast's FAQ about Xfinity's hotspots doesn't go into any details about channels and bands," writes Samara Lynn, "but the company should be clear about how adding these hotspot networks affects the performance of existing WLANs-especially in business use."
(Score: 3, Informative) by clone141166 on Friday June 13 2014, @09:04AM
Pretty much the kind of idea I've come to expect from Comcast. If it's evil, exploitative and generally a bad idea you can bet Comcast is going to be involved.
Ignoring the cable/wireless congestion issues, having random public users able to access and push traffic through your home router... that's not a disaster waiting to happen at all. I love that they are going to charge users an extra $6/month for the privilege of being exploited. Could Comcast possibly be any more evil?
(Score: 1) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 13 2014, @12:30PM
In exchange for allowing Comcast to configure your home router as a hotspot, you gain access to similar hotspots in other neighborhoods across the country. If this were a grass-roots initiative to add an Open Source SID to dd-wrt, share bandwidth for travelers, and stick it to the broadband monopolies, I think the response would be very different. After all, plenty of people run TOR nodes.
Now, it's definitely shitty that Comcast has decided to 'just do' this, rather than explain the options to their customers and let the opt in-or-out of bandwidth sharing, but for the 99% of us who don't continuously saturate our upstream and downstream links, a second subnet with its own SID and no route to my own home network SID seems like a small inconvenience. Especially if it means I can use 'free' wifi rather than cell minutes when I'm visiting friends.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday June 13 2014, @04:33PM
Especially if it means I can use 'free' wifi rather than cell minutes when I'm visiting friends.
Your "friends" won't let you use their signal? You have shitty "friends". You also have a shitty carrier, my minutes and data useage are unlimited, and I only pay $40 per month.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 13 2014, @01:10PM
> having random public users able to access and push traffic through your home router
Are you sure?
The public traffic is completely isolated from your traffic. It has its own bandwidth allocation and its own network. It can't get into your home network and you can't get onto the network it uses unless you connect to the public hotspot yourself.
This is a non-issue. The only thing that comcast did wrong here is to fail to anticipate that people will over-react to anything they do because they are such a hated company.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by LookIntoTheFuture on Friday June 13 2014, @01:27PM
I don't think it is an over-reaction. They may say that it is impossible to connect to your home network through an xfinitywifi AP, but, how do you know? Say a vulnerability is discovered that allows the two "networks" to talk to each other. Would it be fixed? Would you even find out about it? This is Comcast. They didn't become the most hated company for nothing. At the very least, this move decreases security for those who lease their equipment from Comcast.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 13 2014, @01:52PM
> They may say that it is impossible to connect to your home network through an xfinitywifi AP, but, how do you know?
Since CATV is a broadcast medium you can make the exact same argument about every other user on the segment. You can also argue that the router might also be vulnerable to attacks over the internet, such exploits have been discovered in off-the-shelf routers, and that would make you vulnerable to all potential attackers in the world rather than those who are just physically proximate.
In other words your hypothetical is just one among many and while nothing is impossible the marginal increase in risk is quite small, certainly not in proportion to the level of freak-out.
(Score: 2) by LookIntoTheFuture on Friday June 13 2014, @03:24PM
It is one more attack vector. That is all.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by LookIntoTheFuture on Friday June 13 2014, @03:46PM
Well, maybe two. What's to stop someone from creating their own AP called xfinitywifi and capturing everything that is transmitted and received? A VPN would solve this, but how many people have actually even heard of it?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 13 2014, @09:57PM
> What's to stop someone from creating their own AP called xfinitywifi and capturing everything that is transmitted and received?
How is that any different from any other wifi network? Anyone can impersonate a wifi access point and snoop the traffic. Certainly that is not an increased risk to the guy with the router in his house.
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Friday June 13 2014, @04:30PM
Indeed (and not just Comcast, they're all sociopathis organizations). I dumped AT&T and got connected to Comcast when AT&T more than doubled the price, and my notebook wouldn't connect -- my own Cisco router was completely drowning out the Comcast router. With my own router I could get a signal on my phone 2 or 3 houses away, with the Comcast router it barely reaches the sidewalk by the street.
So not only will I have a weak signal, it will be worse if others latch on to it. Odd, Comcast advertises their superior speed, but pages loaded faster on DSL (probably because of the cheap assed router).
There was a silver lining to the Comcast router -- my Cisco was apparently spewing harmonics because when it was on I couldn't pick up channels 49 on my TV (I blame my cheap digital tuner that should be able to filter it out but doesn't).
If you want to use your own router, you'll have to cover the Comcast router with foil, because the modem is built into the router and that's the only way to disable its wifi, short of vandalizing Comcast equipment by opening it and cutting the lead to the antennas.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org
(Score: 1) by overtech on Friday June 13 2014, @08:55PM
Not only that they will charge you a $8 a month to rent the router.