
Man uses 35 cable modems to provide WiFi, sued by Comcast - vaksel
http://arstechnica.com/telecom/news/2009/03/comcast-goes-after-illegal-resale-of-its-internet-service.ars
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rfurmani
The headline makes him out to be cleverer than he actually is. He put up a
webpage with one-page "white papers" about internet installations for hotels
and resorts. He then registered a residential account with Comcast under his
name, and hooked it up to provide cheap internet for the hotel. He then did
this for 34 other hotels, until a Comcast technician doing maintenance noticed
this ad hoc setup.

Despite the residential agreement being very clear that you are not allowed to
resell the service, he is pleading non-guilty and that he was "simply being
singled out because he was successful."

This isn't a story about a big corporation beating up on an entrepreneur or
someone trying to share. This is about someone who was taking Comcast's
services, using it commercially, and charging (presumably) a large mark-up. It
also points out the importance of reading carefully through agreements when
you start a business!

Comcast has a right to cancel his accounts, to pursue litigation in order to
find the addresses of all of his other illegal installations and, yes, to use
the threat of monetary damages. You don't want a bad precedent forming.

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ars
Unlike DSL cable modems are registered by mac address, and not by physical
location. So you can get an account at one address, but really use it at
another.

This can cause big problems for law enforcement.

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blasdel
You don't have to pay for service at all.

For starters, you can always use someone else's MAC address, as long as they
aren't on the same neighborhood loop. Since you can easily sniff all the MACs
on your loop, you can just trade lists with someone elsewhere. Most ISPs have
only one global MAC database, so locality doesn't matter.

If that wasn't enough, for all the US ISPs I know of, you don't even have to
have a valid subscriber MAC. You just configure your hacked modem to fetch a
high-end config file (instead of "walledgarden.cm"), and set your own non-
poisoned DNS. Many ISPs in Europe change their config filenames constantly to
at least make you _try_.

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jrockway
I love the trumped-up charges. Fraud? I am sure the average Pirate Bay user
costs Comcast more money than this guy.

Either way, he is a $50/month business DSL line away from being back in
business.

