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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: 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