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Uhhh, sanity check: If you lived in a state like Hawaii where the cost of residential electricity approaches outrageous territory (i.e. ~$0.50/kWh), then you'd be hard pressed to save $1 per month trimming -2.4W nominal consumption with this hack.

Perhaps I'm just naive, but this struck me as the buried lede:

> ...but even in bridge mode, the gateway broadcasts several hidden SSIDs with no option to disable the radios.

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The cheaper service more than offsets the cost of electricity, I just prefer to use an OpenWrt router, and it bothered me to burn more energy on a worse modem that spews WiFi for no apparent reason. If xfinitywifi were on the list, I would at least understand what it's for.

10W idle for edge appliances is crazy when you think about it.

On a yearly basis if you lower consumption by one watt it saves you 8.5kWh My network and internet access needs between 1-15W, I save about 80kWh compared to this setup. Even with one watt less it actually makes sense if you care about many installs.

My rate goes to infinity at the darker times of the year.

In SF Bay Area my PG&E rate is also close to 0.5$/kWh…

My condolences...looks[1] painful.

[1] https://www.pge.com/assets/pge/docs/account/rate-plans/resid...

There’s 13 million households in California. Theoretically, if every household saved 2 watts with this change it would remove a small gas power plant from the grid. It’s nothing for one household but this sort of efficiency at scale makes a difference.

That's all motherhood and apple pie, but it's a red herring with no basis in pragmatic reality (i.e. not how the calculus of utility-scale power generation industrial planning/ops works), and wholesale disingenuous to posit that even a residual percentage of those households---say, asymptotic to the proportional marketshare of Firefox users in the state as a comparatively low friction proxy aspirational target---would even attempt this hack...to say nothing of its trade-offs or implied liabilities to the end user iff successfully implemented...or how Comcast would be incentivized if adoption achieved a critical mass that made the hack observable (either technically or monetarily) on their end.

Not to discredit the author for sharing the insight, but the hard sell of saving 2W consumption simply isn't a prime mover here. If anything, mitigation of implicit side channel RF interference when the hack is paired with a OpenWrt router (as the author apparently intended) makes a lot more compelling sense...but now we're talking about bootstrapping an additional appliance into the setup, rendering contextual discussion of power savings objectively moot.

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