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Comment by WalterGR | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Xfinity is the big one. Their devices create two hotspots: one for the customer and one to power their Xfinity WiFi service and for bandwidth offloading for their cellular service.

Instructions for disabling it: https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/disable-xfinity-wif...

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I have to say though as a xfinity customer, being able to get wifi basically anywhere urban is pretty nice

Yea this almosts sounds like it could be a great idea with proper execution, nothing like this in the UK. Imagine if they were upfront and said "well knock a tenner (or whatever is reasonable in the US) if you allow your access point to be used as a hotspot"

> nothing like this in the UK.

It turns out there are several similar services offered in the UK by ISP's like O2, Sky, and BT¹ (recently rebranded as EE-WiFi²) who claim to be the UK's largest WiFi Hotspot Network. Perhaps that's due to it being opt-out on their routers since it was first introduced over a decade ago.

[¹]: https://info.btwifi.com/help/

[²]: https://ee-wifi.ee.co.uk/public/ee/index.htm

This is actually hotspot rollouts as far as I know though? You dont see BT/EE wifi networks everywhere, particularly not where you'd expect to see a concentration like residential streets / buildings with this kind of system, mainly see BT / O2 hotspots in public spaces like train stations + event spaces.

Tbf may just be less monopolisation of broadband making it more sparse, but they actually have a map of hotspots on that site which implies they are intentionally placed.

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