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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 http on Friday June 13 2014, @03:17PM
It's not a "public" hotspot. It's a "Comcast customer" hotspot. You log in to their network with your Comcast credentials. Now Comcast gets to track many of its customer's movements also.
A similar project is underway in my town by the local cable monopoly. Judging from friends who use it, the coverage is both good and substantial. The poison pill is, it provides a mild "why bother" disincentive for businesses downtown to provide wifi. My inner paranoid curmudgeon says that tracking is the least of worries, that the real long term plan is to make running a genuine public no-login hotspot appear at least unusual, if not outrightly suspicious.
I'm curious as to how Ios 8's new MAC randomization scheme will work with it.
I browse at -1 when I have mod points. It's unsettling.
(Score: 2) by joshuajon on Friday June 13 2014, @03:34PM
As I understand it the MAC randomization is only used for the network scanning. The wifi NIC probably transmits the correct MAC when actually connecting to a network. If that is not the case I sure hope this feature can be turned off.