Comcast Sued For Turning User Routers Into Public Hotspots Comcast is facing a new class action over the company's push to turn customer routers into publicly available Xfinity hotspots. In June of last year Comcast announced that the company was launching a new, Fon-like effort that involved new router firmware that turns your gateway into a publicly-accessible hotspot. More specifically, updated routers would now offer two signals: one being yours, and the other being a "xfinitywifi" SSID signal providing free Wi-Fi to other Comcast users in your general area.

Fortunately, users can disable this functionality if they don't want to share their bandwidth with strangers, but Comcast says this functionality is enabled by default. The public usage also thankfully doesn't count against your Comcast usage cap (if you have one in your market), and Comcast will push more bandwidth your direction to compensate for additional strain on your line. However, as we've been noting the program's opt out functionality doesn't always work and appears to reset after firmware updates. Complaints have also popped up over the last year about the fact that Comcast's using your electricity to market their services and sell Wi-Fi. Now Comcast is facing a lawsuit for all of these reasons, and for failing to get user consent before this functionality goes live: quote: (The plaintiff) claims that Comcast saw its millions of residential customers as an opportunity to compete with major cellular carriers such as AT&T and Verizon. Though Comcast does not have cellular towers, its customers' households "could be used as infrastructure for a national wi-fi network," the complaint states...In using its customers' home networks to build a national network, Comcast "has externalized the costs of its national wi-fi network onto its customers," Grear says in the complaint. As it's always worth noting, you can avoid being Comcast's public Wi-Fi guinea pig (and the $10 per month rental charge) by simply Comcast Complaint As it's always worth noting, you can avoid being Comcast's public Wi-Fi guinea pig (and the $10 per month rental charge) by simply buying your own compatible router and modem







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IowaCowboy

Supermarket Hero

Premium Member

join:2010-10-16

Springfield, MA ARRIS SB6183

Netgear R8000

12 recommendations IowaCowboy Premium Member Good I pay enough in utility costs, if they want to use my house as a hotspot, they can install a separate electric meter and provide the necessary wiring and hardware.



Any use of my utilities (no matter how little) is theft of utilities under the general laws of the commonwealth of Massachusetts. Even plugging a cell phone charger into someone else's power without permission is theoretically theft of utilities.



Not only is Comcast charging for the routers but they are using them for their own gain. Who the heck is their general counsel. Even a first year law student would advise them they'd end up on the losing end of a lawsuit. Even a paralegal would say it's not a good idea.



I hope the plaintiffs prevail.