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Comcast Turns Houston Users Routers Into Public 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, update 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.

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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), but it will obviously consume some of your bandwidth (though Comcast claims they push a little extra bandwidth when the feature is active so it all balances out).

The effort has been seeing scattered deployment on a market-by-market basis, and in a few instances the new functionality has confused the hell out of some Comcast users, who didn't know they'd suddenly be offering free Wi-Fi to others.

This week the functionality appears to be getting turned on for Houston customers. Much like the national deployment Houston's launch appears staggered, with Comcast enabling the functionality 50,000 Houston users at a time through the rest of the month. Other Comcast markets will see the update as the year rolls on.

Most recommended from 96 comments


ssavoy
Premium Member
join:2007-08-16
Dallas, PA

3 recommendations

ssavoy

Premium Member

No rental fee

I've been impressed with xfinitywifi so far. They should remove the rental fee as an incentive to keep this feature on, though. It feels a bit shady piggybacking on equipment customers are paying for. Then again, this is a cableco we're talking about.

AnonMe
@75.150.99.x

2 recommendations

AnonMe

Anon

Usage caps bypassed

I have mixed feelings about this, but there may be an upside to all those who are concerned about caps on their home service. Since usage on this xfinity wifi network doesn't count against the resident's measured usage (in areas that have it), does that mean you can then connect your home wifi devices like your streaming player to this wifi network and then essentially have unlimited streaming?

Or once you log into an xfinity wifi point, does that usage get pegged against your home modem account?

Comcast's xfinitywifi authentication seems to be based on MAC address and probably a RADIUS server, so you'd have to get your streaming player's MAC address authorized, but that's pretty simple to do.