Xfinity wants to open up your home wifi to the public!

[Guytronic]

We have two choices Consolidated or Xfinity...
...maybe we could get AT&T not positive though.

Consolidated used to be SureWest which used to be Roseville Telephone.
Xfinity does have a lot of subscriber hotspots everywhere here though.

Weird thing I noticed is wherever there is a cell service tower there seems to be an Xfinity hotspot.

 

[palandri]

We have two choices Consolidated or Xfinity...
...maybe we could get AT&T not positive though.

Consolidated used to be SureWest which used to be Roseville Telephone.
Xfinity does have a lot of subscriber hotspots everywhere here though.

Weird thing I noticed is wherever there is a cell service tower there seems to be an Xfinity hotspot.

What about: Turn the wifi off and use a different wifi router. If you can't turn the wifi off, supply your own cable modem.

 

[tgp]

A friend of mine has Comcast, along with the wireless hotspot option. He said that others logging in to your router does not affect you at all. It uses their bandwidth and data. If you pay for 5Mbps and whoever logs in pays for 25Mbps, they will get 25Mbps. If they download 300GB of data, it will go towards their cap, not yours.

The upside is that you have the same capability when you're away from home. For example, if you're in a city, it's quite possible you can find a Comcast hotspot to log in to, rather than using your mobile data.

As far as security, it shouldn't be any different than having any other wireless router in your home. The only password someone else knows is their own.

 

[trekgraham]

From what I understand their ate two separate networks: Private and public. Public will require Comcast account user name and password. Max of 5 users on it. And max of 15 Mbit down. There is a way to disable it on the user account manager on Comcast.com

 

[Guytronic]

What about: Turn the wifi off and use a different wifi router.
If you can't turn the wifi off, supply your own cable modem.

Could do this I guess...
We have the triple (ripoff) play so VOIP is provided thru the Xfinity router.
I notice the open connection is about half speed on mobile devices.

(If I do anything to damage the wife's Facebook connection I will surely be sent to the penalty box for an extended period)

A friend of mine has Comcast, along with the wireless hotspot option. He said that others logging in to your router does not affect you at all. It uses their bandwidth and data. If you pay for 5Mbps and whoever logs in pays for 25Mbps, they will get 25Mbps. If they download 300GB of data, it will go towards their cap, not yours.

I thought this was how it worked.
Wasn't too clear on this tho...

 

[trekgraham]

Could do this I guess...
We have the triple (ripoff) play so VOIP is provided thru the Xfinity router.
I notice the open connection is about half speed on mobile devices.

(If I do anything to damage the wife's Facebook connection I will surely be sent to the penalty box for an extended period)



I thought this was how it worked.
Wasn't too clear on this tho...

Just goto Comcast.com login to my account and there will be an option to disable the public hotspot

 

[michail71]

Well, it has no impact on the host subscriber's bandwidth or data usage. It's a separate wifi network with a separate bandwidth. Not unlike how it's already shared amongst neighbors. However, there could be a minimal impact on electrical usage. Not sure if it's of any significance. The limit of 5 is probably to not impact resources on the modem.

Perhaps they could make it opt-in and market the service better. Only people that opt in can use the hotspots. The disadvantage is fewer hotspots making the service less attractive.

I'd like to see perhaps a credit added to the account or a free modem rental out of it. The article about the class action lawsuit claims it's close to $30/year for electricity to broadcast the additional network.

It's crowd sourcing. It builds a large, reliable, semi-public wifi network that might actually work compared to typical hotspots that are slow, congested and drop like crazy.