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. The update has been slowly deployed on a market-by-market basis.

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.

Still, Mari Silbey over at Light Reading raises concerns about how much bandwidth passers by are consuming when they use Comcast customer routers. Historically Comcast has told me that the router will adjust on the fly to manage the load, and Comcast's Charlie Dougles tells Silbey that users being elbowed out from their own routers is not something they're seeing:

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Charlie Douglas, executive director of corporate communications at Comcast, confirmed that home hotspots could experience network congestion from guest users simply because of the way that WiFi works. "If you were at a baseball stadium, and it was empty, and the WiFi was on, and you were there by yourself, you would have an amazing experience," Douglas elaborated. But, he continued, if the stadium filled up, your online experience would slow down.

Douglas, however, was quick to point out that Comcast hasn't received reports of performance problems on home hotspots because of added traffic from guest users. "It's not something we're seeing," he said. He also thinks problems are unlikely in the future because of WiFi's limited range. A guest user would need to park and stay parked near someone's home hotspot in order to take advantage of it.

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As noted above, users can chose to opt out of the functionality entirely. Comcast states that less than 1% have chosen to do so thus far, though judging from the confusion and surprise in some markets when this feature is turned on, that may not mean much. It's worth noting that some users in our forums have reported having a difficult time actually opting out.

Footing the power bill for passers by has also been a concern with the Comcast's router update. connection-bonding outfit Speedify issued a report earlier this year that found Comcast's sharing routers would cost users around $23 per year in additional power costs. Comcast protested the numbers and sent Speedify another router to test, only to have the results actually show greater power consumption.

Comcast users in enabled markets: what have your experiences been with the functionality?