On Tue, 15 Sep 2015, Per Jessen wrote:
greg.freemyer@gmail.com wrote:
Semi-off-topic, but this thread reminds me about Comcast's rather unique WiFi offering. The have millions of wireless routers around the country in people's homes and businesses.
They got the rather unique idea that they could make them all advertise the "xfinity" SSID, then let any of their customers use any of their wireless routers. Thus I can log into literally millions of residential wireless routers using my comcast credentials. Comcast knows it's me and tracks my bandwidth and charges it against my monthly allotment regardless of which router i'm using.
UPC Cablecom (Liberty Global) does the same here. AFAIK (I am not a cablecom customer), given customer permission, their routers have two SSIDs, one for the customer, one for all other cablecom customers. Quite clever.
The biggest cable company in the Netherlands does it as well. At first they were UPC and Ziggo separate, but those companies merged. It started out back in the day with the FON network. Fon tried to strike deals with telco's, and was successful in Portugal/Spain, Belgium and the UK (among others perhaps). In the UK BT (British Telecom) offered a Fon service for its customers which meant that I could also log into it using my Fon credentials (friend tested it for me). In the Netherlands most companies stayed away from Fon and created their own solution/network. Personally I don't like it because I never was the one who decided that I'd share my wifi and these routers downloading updates from centralized servers is a security risk. But even Fon went out the door with me, I just 'hacked' their cheap router and put OpenWRT on it :p. Sharing wifi may be nice but if you never know who you are sharing with, it is not really a "sharing" experience. Fon tried to turn it into a sunny community -- : become a Fonero!!!. And it was interesting particularly because it was a bit of a 'grass roots movement' or at least had the feel of it. And you could earn money with it, if you had a busy spot. The service was available to non-members for a small payment. In the end it was a nice idea but if it's not even opt-in I don't want it. In the UPC modem/router you can turn the service off, but actually it is turned off remotely and your thing "knows" about your choice apparently. It's a chance on building community but this way there is no community at all, just bragging rights for the cable company.
-- Per Jessen, Zürich (15.9°C) http://www.hostsuisse.com/ - virtual servers, made in Switzerland.
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