Hacker News Reader

Comcast in the US (idk ++millions of users) by default enables a 2nd WiFi network that is open to all of their subscribers. Is convenient, amusing, and annoying, depending on perspective.

View on HN

To be fair - it is rate-limited and QoS-managed and traffic doesn’t count towards your usage limit (if you have one).

Back when I was a Comcast customer I did find it useful when I was in an area with no - or too slow - mobile-data connections.

Also, I believe using other people's xfinitywifi doesn't count towards your bandwidth.

BT in the UK does a similar thing - called "Fon"

I assume that traffic on that network is always qossed to lowest priority, but I've never used it (I don't use a BT router)

I glad to hear that Fon is still around. Back when they were giving out free AP's I snagged a couple and they were my first foray into hardware hacking. Neat little devices, I always felt a bit guilty about not using them to actually deploy fon hotspots.

A year or two ago they sent an email to all of us with 1st gen FON hardware and said they were retiring it and that we'd have to buy a new one. I didn't.

They never disabled my account - I not get worldwide FON roaming for free forever - yay!

Virgin Media do this too, your box is by default something like VM123456-[2|5]G and an (optional) 'community' hotspot (like FON) of VirginMedia

Reply on news.ycombinator.com