> 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) 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.
> 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+)