Comment by manyxcxi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by manyxcxi | Hacker News Reader

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I love to bag on Comcast/Xfinity as much as the next guy, but, honestly, I would lump all of the cable and DSL companies together at the bottom of a latrine as far as customer service and 'value' go.

However, I'd be willing to bet that in most areas Comcast is probably your most reliable and fastest choice- unless you can get fiber, then always do that.

I was spoiled in Portland for years with Verizon (then later Frontier) fiber. When I moved to Seattle I was shocked that the best I could do was Comcast.

After 5 years with them I had one incident that involved an actually shitty customer experience that was saved by one of the best customer support experiences I've ever gotten anywhere (thanks Joe in Seattle Comcast Tier 3 tech support).

I've been using my own modem since before it was cool, so I never got hit by the monthly rate hikes or the 'free wifi' hotspot you can't disable.

If I didn't have fiber in my area now I'd begrudgingly get Comcast (if only just for internet) as my next choice.

You know there's a certain irony that I would never ever use a modem that I can't turn off the XFinity wifi crap, but I absolutely love having the ability to use other people's XFinity wifi. I pretty much have access to free wifi everywhere because of it, even spent two weeks in my new apartment mooching off someone else's wifi until I could get fiber installed.

The xfinitywifi access points I've come across (just about everywhere I go) are unsecured but not free. You need an account before they'll handle your traffic. IOW, useful to Comcast customers but nobody else.

That is sort of the whole point, for Comcast.

I know if I were a comcast engineer having to read these posts continually I'd likely end up having a coronary.

You do understand the "XFinity wifi crap" has absolutely zero affect on you whatsoever, with the exception of the 50mw or whatever power draw that extra SSID takes right?

If so, why do you hate it so much? It's an amazing idea - on Comcast owned CPE create a network-wide wifi network before you hand off to the customer. It affects that customer's traffic in absolutely no what whatsoever any more than anyone else on the neighborhood cable segment would. In exchange for $.50 worth of power a year, I now gain access to a city-wide network of rather surprising density. I fail to see a downside.

I'm very curious why you think this is remotely a problem. I hate on Comcast more than the average guy, but the absolutely incorrect FUD they get on this product even on HN where folks should know better is beyond puzzling to me.

One thing that's kind of selfish but could be seen as a con is that the xfinity wifi takes up some of the spectrum. That's kind of a cop out though, it's not your spectrum in the first place, even in your own property.

What's nice about it is that you can increase your speed if you have a router capable of load balancing by having one interface be the typical WAN and the other interface being the xfinity wifi.

> If so, why do you hate it so much? It's an amazing idea - on Comcast owned CPE create a network-wide wifi network before you hand off to the customer. It affects that customer's traffic in absolutely no what whatsoever any more than anyone else on the neighborhood cable segment would.

> I'm very curious why you think this is remotely a problem. I hate on Comcast more than the average guy, but the absolutely incorrect FUD they get on this product even on HN where folks should know better is beyond puzzling to me.

Have you ever lived in an apartment complex?

1) The interference from a block of 20 units is now doubled and massively overlapping.

2) The people in the common area by the pool by those units are now drawing on the wifi rather than using cellular. So, yeah, it has a net effect of adding people to the "neighborhood" that would not otherwise be there.

Comcast pretty much rendered Wifi completely unusable in the last apartment I lived in. (i.e. Sub ~5mbps speeds on a 75mbps connection that used to serve wifi at 20mbps+)

> 1) The interference from a block of 20 units is now doubled and massively overlapping.

Not true. It's a second "virtual" SSID, not a second physical AP. If it has no clients, you're just getting an extra periodic advertisement packet.

Of course your second point stands. But that interference scales with # of connected users, not # of APs.

1) is simply untrue - someone else here posted why. It's a virtual SSID, same as you creating a second private network on your Ubiquiti AP or whatnot. It does not increase spectrum usage.

I understand that this could have created access points in apartments that didn't previously have them, but that was likely to happen either way. I also understand most folks are not used to living in extreme wifi density, so it's a shock at what you have to do to get good coverage. Welcome to the unlicensed band - in many areas you have to have a AP within visual range of you to get decent performance and this has nothing to do with Comcast. I actually just finished installing an AP-per-room in my place, due to the sheer number of neighbor APs. Only a few of which were Xfinity - I am quite used to living in high density environments.

The days of naively tossing up the latest and greatest AP+router combo with the highest gain antenna possible is largely over, at least for anything resembling an urban environment. You see many companies in the space realizing this and you'll see even more products based around the need. It's far better to have lots of small lower power APs within LoS, and will be the only way forward as the unlicensed band gets more and more utilized (e.g. verizon LTE potentially using it).

2) Perhaps. It is plausible (but relatively unlikely) that a neighborhood segment is already overloaded, and the intermittent wifi usage of passing-through customers increases that contention. I have no data, but I would be surprised if this was a material concern. I know I only connect to it when I absolutely need it, since it's "roaming" without the app is such a giant pita.

Nice try, Comcast Engineer!

Mostly because I don't trust that the software they (Comcast et al.) are using to enable this is going to actually:

- Always and correctly not be seen as MY traffic

- Prevent a jump from the public to my private LAN

- Not leave me exposed in some previously unimagined way

- Slow down my personal internet experience

In the past the Comcast WiFi hardware was particularly prone to not handling a lot of WiFi clients very well.

Additionally, I don't want to run their WiFi, I have Ubiquiti gear I'd rather use.

Also, I don't want to pay them $x a month to rent the hardware.

Finally, even if I feel the probability is near zero and I've got nothing to hide, I still don't want to add just one more way I can possibly get screwed.

Of course you can turn it off. Just wrap your modem in tin foil.

I know- I used to do the exact same. There was a twinge of cognitive dissonance but in the end it was usually outweighed by my 'need' for internet.

Though it did actually save my butt in a couple work situations.

> I was shocked that the best I could do was Comcast.

I can't help but feel that all of the providers are at this point happy to not compete with each other. It's expensive to build out infrastructure, and where they don't compete, they can charge more. This feels like there should be a monopoly case against all of them for effectively being in league with each other, even if there has been no explicit agreement.

On top of that, states like Tennessee blocking cities from expanding their own networks to help reach those who only have one provider? And the providers trying to argue that 10mbits is broadband?!

I'd like to see that where this is barely competition, municipalities take over. But, that doesn't necessarily mean much as in SF we've passed two resolutions for city wide wifi, and it's basically a sham.

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