Remember back in June, when Comcast began lighting up a network of public Wi-Fi hotspots generated by its residential customers’ Xfinity modems without first asking their permission? Some customers had concerns about privacy and bandwidth issues, and now there’s been a class action lawsuit filed in a San Francisco federal court over Comcast’s practice.
From San Francisco Chronicle reporter Benny Evangelista :
Two San Francisco-area residents are suing Comcast for plugging their home’s wireless router into what they call a power-wasting, Internet-clogging, privacy threatening network of public WiFi hot spots.
The class-action lawsuit, filed last week in U.S. District Court on behalf of Toyer Grear and her daughter Joycelyn Harris, claims Comcast is “exploiting them for profit” by using their home’s router as part of a nationwide network of public hot spots.
In Houston, Comcast estimated last summer that 150,000 of its combination Wi-Fi router/cablemodems would be broadcasting an “Xfinity Wi-Fi” hotspot. Those hotspots would be free to use by other Comcast customers, and others could pay a small fee to access it.
Comcast customers who have their own modems and routers aren’t affected. (And if you’re interested in using your own equipment with Comcast’s Internet service, here’s how .)
Comcast insisted that the hotspot connections wouldn’t negatively affect customers’ own bandwidth, and because the Xfinity Wi-Fi hotspot had its own was separate from customers’ networks, security was not an issue.
But the pair who filed the lawsuit don’t buy it. As originally reported by Courthouse News , the plaintiffs say that not only is their privacy at risk, but their data speeds are slower and the Xfinity hotspot causes higher electric bills:
Engineers at Speedify, a technology company that increases Internet connection speeds, ran tests on Comcast’s new routers and determined that “Comcast will be pushing tens of millions of dollars per month of the electricity bills needed to run their nationwide public wi-fi network onto consumers,” the complaint states.
Based on the results of this study, Grear claims, Comcast’s residential customers can expect electricity cost increases as great as 30 to 40 percent.
In addition, Grear claims, the Xfinity hotspots slow down the speed of customers’ home wi-fi networks, since these home networks are available for use by strangers.
They also expose Comcast’s residential customers’ data to increased privacy and security risks, according to the complaint.
Not sure I accept that a secondary Wi-Fi signal can increase electric costs by up to 40 percent – though it may cause the router to use a little more power, which would negligible in terms of actual costs.
Comcast declined to comment for the Chronicle or Courthouse News.
Xfinity Wi-Fi
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