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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, 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.