[ale] OT: Comcast Wi-Fi

[Lightner, Jeff]

Saying things done by corporations are not stupid or unethical or illegal doesn’t match my experience at all.

Just because it would be “obvious” to people that think that things should be a certain way is no reason to believe that they are that way.    Most corporations are more interested in rolling out new things quickly than they are in insuring they don’t do them stupidly.    Assuming that they might actually NOT gouge you by charging you for the bandwidth they are providing to others would be foolhardy.   Whether they would do that by design (which is feasible) or by lack of attention to detail (which is also feasible) would be anyone’s guess.   I’ve had to call Comcast on more than one occasion after seeing the antics they’ve played with my bills.

If you don’t think corporations do things to maximize their profits I’ll point out the recent article mentioning how very large banks (Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America all mentioned) are posting transactions that overdraft your account from largest to smallest rather than chronologically to insure you end up paying more overdraft fees on smaller (yet chronologically earlier) checks.   They were previously caught doing exactly the same thing with debit card transactions but I think that got outlawed when they did some of the hasty banking reforms back in 2008/2009.

Or look at the fact that GM is only now recalling parts that have been known to kill people over a long period of years.

Corporations are in business to make money and pretending they don’t do shady if not outright illegal actions to that end is silly given all evidence to the contrary.

From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Brian Mathis
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2014 11:23 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] OT: Comcast Wi-Fi

On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Michael H. Warfield <mhw at wittsend.com<mailto:mhw at wittsend.com>> wrote:
On Thu, 2014-04-24 at 14:40 -0400, Boris Borisov wrote:
> Yesterday I've noticed Comcast silently enabled additional wireless
> network on my cable router named "xfinitywifi". I didn't get the
> reason behind the idea but is open with web based login. Someone else
> with same issue.

Congratulations.  You just became the newest member of the Comcast
wireless internet cafe provider club.  Someone with a Comcast login can
now log in through the Comcast app gateway and take advantage of their
expanded WiFi footprint through your free bandwidth that they're
offering up!

This has been mentioned in a number of forums over the last several
months.  I don't recall if you can or how you opt-out of them offering
your bandwidth to all comers.  Since I don't have Comcast, I can not
test and say for sure from first hand experience.

Regards,
Mike

Please stop with the conspiracy theories.  Comcast may be evil, but they are not stupid, and anything they do is most certainly going to be legal.

Adding this service from a customer location is:
1) Most likely in your customer agreement somewhere

2) OBVIOUSLY not going to count against bandwidth caps on your own account

3) OBVIOUSLY isolated to a different subnet/channel, just like any neighbor of yours could not see your traffic

4) Uses a totally separate wifi subsystem, which is why they need to "upgrade" your equipment for this service to work.  The new cable modem needs to have a totally separate AP, or at least a chip that can support multiple wireless APs.

5) Your own service speed will not be affected any differently than if your neighbor was using their own bandwidth.

No, I don't have a source for any of this, but these are clearly the first questions anyone would ask inside a company when they decide to roll out a service like this.  Common sense isn't all that common, but this stuff is just bloody obvious.

If they didn't do any of these, they could easily be sued by customers for either exposing their networks to security risks, and/or using up the data caps they paid for.  The only possible complaint you could make is more power usage, but at only a few hundred milliwatts for the additional wifi network, that's barely costing you a penny per year in power usage, if that.


❧ Brian Mathis










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