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Wednesday
Jan292014

Is your Xfinity modem a Public Hotspot?

An interesting subject was brought up at our Friday meetings couple weeks ago about how Comcast is testing a new service for making your Xfinity modem into a public hotspot for the community around you. They are doing this by creating a second signal for each device that is totally separate from the one that you use for your personal connection to the Internet through their modem. Comcast states that the secondary signal does not take away any of your speed for your side of the connection.

They also say that there is no cross connection, so you don't have to worry about somebody hopping onto your side of the network. This public access is only available to those Comcast subscribers of the Xfinity Wi-Fi network service.

"Comcast’s newest Wireless Gateway broadcasts two Wi-Fi signals," the company said. "By default, one is securely configured for the private use of the home subscriber. The second is a neighborhood 'xfinitywifi' network signal that can be shared. This creates an extension of the Xfinity Wi-Fi network and will allow visiting Xfinity Internet subscribers to sign in and connect using their own usernames and passwords."

This service is being piloted in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Northern Virginia, and the greater Washington, DC metro area.

There doesn't seem to be much advantage to individual Comcast subscribers when they are at home, since anyone with a home wireless network can already set up a guest access for visitors. But subscribers could potentially benefit when their out of the house and happened to be near another Comcast subscribers wireless Gateway. Through a partnership with the CableWiFi Alliance, Comcast already has a network of more than 150,000 hotspots in more than a dozen US cities.

There been several discussions on the benefits of providing this type of service besides the obvious one of expanding a user subscription benefit, one being that it provides hotspot access for emergency use or emergency communications.

The Comcast says there is no problem with interference, one concern that I have is the number of channels that will be used in a highly concentrated area and what kind of degradation you can expect from doubling the impact from each of these connections. Are these motives intelligent enough to help with this type of issue is a question that needs to be answered. I know that with products like Aruba wireless networking that we run into this concern all the time. So I can imagine that this might not be an issue in apartment complexes where you would have many households that might be providing additional signals, congesting the airwaves.

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