The Joys of Comcast... a 2 part blog post?

Today I'm here to write of the joys of being a subscriber to Comcast... Which I guess is technically known as Xfinity now, however I refuse to accept their rebranding until I see a difference in service quality.

This incident started last monday, when my roommate sent me a text that said "we are at our data limit for the month...may want to cut back on the downloading." I laughed, as I keep careful track of the downloads in our house, and told him we'd check it out when we both get home. Upon my arrival back home, I found 4 notices in the mailbox, addressed to my same roommate. These notices were DMCA violation notices. While there is no action placed behind these, they were quite disturbing for a few reasons. First, no one in the house had watched any of the content we were being accused of downloading. Two, it was a bit too coincidental that we get these notices on the same day we hit our bandwidth cap (which we had never before done in a month, much less a half month, which is where we were at in the billing cycle when this all happened). And third, was that we received four notices at once. We had never received any notices before, and this was just too fishy.

After a bit of snooping around, I discovered an unencrypted network called xfinitywifi being broadcast from our router. After thoroughly searching through the settings, and googling extensively, I came to the conclusion that this was a part of Comcast's new initiative, WiFi everywhere. The idea is that Comcast customers will have access to broadband wifi almost anywhere based on the existing customer architecture. Unfortunately this came at a cost to the original subscriber. Not only is their bandwidth affected by any activity on the xfinitywifi network, but any data used over it counts against the monthly bandwidth cap. While Comcast denies that use of the xfinitywifi network counts against the consumers monthly bandwidth limit, they publicly state elsewhere that all traffic through gateway is counted towards the limit.

Furthermore, upon connecting to this unencrypted wifi network, I am allowed full network access to my homes private wifi network. This network exists inside the firewall, creating a massive security vulnerability for all Comcast users. This was a change that was rolled out nationally in a firmware update for the router. This update was installed automatically, and without an opt in. When you call Comcast asking them to politely turn the network off, they tell you they cant, or that they wont, as it supports the community.


I would have to take matters into my own hands.
Find out how in the second part of this post...coming later today