

Comcast Sued for Turning Home WiFi Routers into Hotspots - windexh8er
http://www.sfgate.com/business/article/Comcast-sued-for-turning-home-Wi-Fi-routers-into-5943750.php

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keeganpoppen
i remember filing this under "dubious but probably legal b/c of some
ridiculous ToS bullshit" when i first saw comcast's announcement about this a
while back. the electricity angle seems pretty interesting-- no matter what
arguments comcast could plausibly make about it not affecting your personal
bandwidth it's pretty much impossible for them to argue that they're not
essentially "stealing" electricity to subsidize their wifi network.

ianal, but the two keys here appear to be that the customers affected seem
only to be people leasing equipment from comcast (ie the customers don't own
the routers) and the opt-out nature of how the network is currently set up, as
compared to a (kinder) parallel universe where such a network would be opt-in.

as to the latter point, i'm not sure if there is any difference in terms of
legal doctrine but it definitely speaks to comcast's greed / customer
hostility that they felt entitled to make the customer subsidize _them_ ,
instead of, say, giving the customer a discount on their bill if they chose to
opt in to providing a base station for the network.

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TrevorJ
I'd also argue that charging you a rental fee for the modem and then turning
around and selling access to the device again is shady as hell.

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TrevorJ
So many things wrong with this:

-Comcast provides a device to me _and charges mea rental fee_ then turns around and profits off of it at _no_ benefit to me. The modem even requires batteries which I have to pay to replace for God's sakes.

-Legal implications of other users potentially accessing illegal materials over a device located in my home.

-The Modem/Router combo supplied by Comcast is a piece of junk, and barely works for home use, let alone handling traffic created by strangers connecting.

I can confirm that Comcast does indeed turn this on without your permission.
Furthermore, unless you pay attention you may not know that it is even
happening. You can't disable it through the router administration either, you
have to go through Comcast's website to find the setting and opt out.

All in all it's kind of a slap in the face after suffering through years of
sub-par service and borderline abusive business practices.

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Sarkie
BT have been doing this for years in the UK.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FON#BT_Fon_Community](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FON#BT_Fon_Community)

