[ale] OT: Comcast Wi-Fi

[Sean Kilpatrick]

Mike has gotten close to what I believe is the only real issue here: 
Comcast will be using your property to house their commercial equipment.
This is bound to violate all sorts of zoning laws, rules, and regulations. 
Terms of Use notwithstanding, you should have (IANAL) an absolute right to 
charge rental fees for the use of your space and electricity -- no matter 
how small the footprint of the equipment or how low the electrical draw.

The first thing I'd ask the Comcast rep for is a copy of the approval 
letter for your specific location from the county zoning office.  Trust me on 
this:  they won't have one and aren't about to ask for one.

Sean

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On Friday, April 25, 2014 11:21:47 am Brian Mathis wrote:
> On Thu, Apr 24, 2014 at 3:12 PM, Michael H. Warfield 
<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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