Comcast Xfinity Wifi hotspots

[Paul Merrell]

Hi, all,

I got an email from Comcast last night that Xfinity Wifi Hotspots are
now available in the Eugene-Springfield area. Free with our Comcast
ISP service. Checked it out on the laptop (from 5th and Q area in
Springfield) and it works.

There is an online map showing the locations of Xfinity hotspots
across the U.S. at <http://wifi.comcast.com/default.htm#maps_block>.
The East Coast is already saturated. On the West Coast, they look to
have begun building out more recently, concurrently from Seattle,
Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. From Portland south within
Oregon, Salem, Corvallis, and Eugene-Springfield now have coverage,
although the map says nothing about signal range.

There are download links on the same page for implementing apps for
Android and Google Play.

If you zoom in far enough, you get a list of specific addresses where
hotspots are located. (Some published reviews indicate that the map
information is unreliable so don't bet your life on it.) Looking at
the map for Eugene-Springfield, I see a lot of businesses that were
already offering free wifi hotspots. Coffee shops and the like.

If you have Comcast ISP service, you should see a new wireless
connection named "xfinitywifi". Requires your Comcast ISP user name
and password to log in. (You may have set up more than one of these
for yourself and others, e.g., your spouse."

Linux Mint on the laptop bespeaks the following wisdom about the
connection from my location:

IPv4 support -- Yes.
IPv6 support -- No.
Signal strength -- fluctuates between 80 and 84 per cent (two minutes'
observation).

Hopefully, the IPv6 support is on the roadmap.

When Comcast announced that it would be building the wifi hotspots,
they said the goal was "complete coverage" of the U.S. As I recall
that was roughly a year ago. That was obviously an overstatement,
considering wifi range and the fact that there are wilderness areas in
the U.S. where no hotspots can be located by law. There are also vast
areas of deep canyons that twist and turn and I can't imagine that
I'll see coverage for all of those in my lifetime, absent satellite
coverage rather than the frequencies allocated to wifi connections.

But the major short-term goals here are, I suspect, the ability to
watch Comcast on-demand (and other) content and reduce market demand
for others, e.g., communities, to jump into a competing wifi-hotspot
industry and for Comcast to exploit the internet content industry with
surcharges to content providers for priority data transmission speeds.

The door to Comcast throttling of connection speeds for users who
consume lots of bandwidth (e.g., heavy Netflix usage) was slammed shut
by an FCC cease and desist order. But the new proposed regulation
issued this week by the FCC would allow ISPs to impose charges on
content providers for faster transmission of data. In my opinion,
there is not a lot of difference for the ISP user if the bulk of the
throttling is done by giving content providers who send a lot of
bandwidth faster transmission for a fee as opposed to throttling users
who consume a lot of bandwidth. It's only the difference between being
throttled by Comcast or higher charges from the content provider. The
content providers who don't pay the fees are still going to be
throttled back.

I see profound antitrust issues with the FCC's proposed rule. The
cable ISP industry was an add-on to community cable monopolies created
my municipalities. Comcast was the biggest winner in the race to
consolidate those regulated monopoly utilities with Verizon in second
place. The result is that high bandwith internet connections are
largely consolidated along geographical lines, with most communities
having only the choice between cable providers and slower DSL
connections. In other words, high bandwidth ISP services a largely
monopolies. ("Monopoly" is defined under antitrust law not as being
the sole provider but being large enough to assert market power over
competition.) And leveraging one monopoly to create another is a
straightforward violation of the Sherman Act's section 2. In this
case, it's the monopoly in the ISP user market being used to leverage
a monopoly on surcharges in the content provider market by throttling
back content whose broadcasters have not succumbed to Comcast and
Verizon extortion of fees. This is what a lot of the Net Neutrality
debate is about in the legal arena.

So to some extent, using the Comcast wifi hotspots tends to be a vote
against Net Neutrality, unless the new FCC rule is blocked. As is, a
court of appeals overturned the FCC's prior Net Neutrality rule while
leaving it open for the FCC to issue a new Net Neutrality rule based
on authority it has other than the authority it relied on in issuing
its Net Neutrality rule. In the interim, Comcast has begun entering
into contracts with content providers such as Netflix for priority
broadcast speed. But rather than adopting a new Net Neutrality rule,
the new proposed rule would allow Comcast to continue its practice.

Comcast stands as the most evil in this debate because it has a
built-in conflict of interest as an ISP service and a subscriber-paid
content service provider. Comcast has every incentive to throttle
competing content providers such as NetFlix. But ISP customers have a
settled expectation that content will not be throttled. When Comcast
imposes charges on content providers, it drives up the expense of
competing content subscriptions.

My personal feeling is that the only way to resolve this mess is for a
court in an antitrust case to force the breakup of Comcast into at
least three companies, the ISP service, the VOIP service, and the
content service, with the ISP service company prohibited from charging
fees to content providers. I.e., make ISP service a regulated utility
service.

But I'm open to better ideas and reasonable minds can differ.

Best regards,

Paul



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