Comcast thinks it ok to install public wifi in your house

Doug Barton dougb at dougbarton.us
Thu Dec 11 20:50:23 UTC 2014


That's interesting, thanks for that info, Mike. Jason has a good point 
in that a lot of the "reporting" on this topic so far has been 
ill-informed, and I think it's important to understand the truth.

Re Rodney and Randy's point about this being blown out of proportion, 
the thing I'm most concerned about is not the service itself, which is 
interesting, and has the capability to be a good utilization of 
resources (as in, a cheap way to provide a beneficial service).

My concerns are that apparently customers are not informed about the 
thing before it gets enabled, and the issue of wifi density that was 
raised by several people here. If you have an apartment building for 
example, where a significant majority of the tenants are Comcast 
customers (cuz in 'murica we loves us some monopolies) I see a lot of 
strong xfinity signals stomping on an already crowded 2.4 G spectrum.

So just to be clear, I'm not being critical at this point, I'm simply 
interested in separating the facts from the hype.

Doug


On 12/11/14 12:42 PM, Mike wrote:
> Doug,
>
>           I use my own router at home, so I opted out, and I can use the service without issue.
>
> Mike
>
>> On Dec 11, 2014, at 2:53 PM, Doug Barton <dougb at dougbarton.us> wrote:
>>
>>> On 12/11/14 10:16 AM, Livingood, Jason wrote:
>>> On 12/11/14, 1:06 PM, "Kain, Rebecca (.)" <bkain1 at ford.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> No one who has Comcast, who I've forward this to, knew about this (all US
>>>> customers).  Maybe you can send here the notification Comcast sent out,
>>>> to your customers.
>>>
>>> I emailed you off-list. I am happy to investigate individual cases. The
>>> rollout has been happening since probably 2009 or 2010.
>>
>> Jason,
>>
>> While that offer is noble, and appreciated, as are your other responses on this thread; personally I would be interested to hear more about how customers were notified. Was there a collateral piece included in their bill? Were they e-mailed?
>>
>> And are we correct in assuming that this is strictly opt-out? And is the report that if you opt out with your account that you are not then able to access the service elsewhere correct?
>>
>> Completely aside from the fact that other services have done something similar, I regard all of this as quite troubling, as it seems others here do as well.
>>
>> Doug
>>
>>




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