Comcast thinks it ok to install public wifi in your house

Fri Dec 12 01:09:44 UTC 2014

On 12/11/14, 3:58 PM, "Jay Ashworth" <jra at baylink.com> wrote:

>Alas, I cannot accept George's assertion
WG] well, perhaps you can accept Wes's assertion instead. ;-)

>In residential areas (non-multi-unit),
>this is only going to help out *Comcast subscribers*.  If you have random
>visitors over, it won't help them, as they can't get authed to the
>service.
WG] Given an average Comcast service area, there is a nonzero chance that
visitors are Comcast customers as well. Given that there are multiple such
service areas, to the tune of 19M+ subs, this is true even if the visitors
aren't local. The chances go up if the AP will accept roaming credentials
from customers of other members of the Cable Wifi initiative (though I am
not sure that this is the case on the resi APs).

>And it doesn't let you help your neighbors for the same reason: if they
>have their own creds for it, then they don't need your AP since they have
>one.
WG] unless they're over visiting you and would like to use WiFi to avoid
using metered (or slow, or both) mobile data, or your AP's signal happens
to be stronger from that one corner of their house/yard than theirs, or
theirs has had its magic smoke released, or...

>
>No, I'm having a hard time figuring out what the use case *is* for this
>service
>as deployed against *residential* hardware, myself...
WG] it's a feature or additional service that can be offered to customers
to use if they find it useful (or not if they don't), done with the
capabilities of the existing hardware, so the bar for "use case" is pretty
low.

Wes (not) George

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