This week, US based Comcast announced a neighbourhood hotspot innovative, which sees Xfinity customers adding an extra SSID to their home WiFi. As well as their own private home signal, customers routers will now broadcast “xfinitywifi” which will allow friends, visitors and potentially passers-by, the opportunity to get online for free.
With over 20 million customers, Comcast will see it’s public WiFi internet access coverage dramatically increase overnight.
Free access will be restricted to people with existing Xfinity accounts, whilst those who aren’t customers will be able to log on for one hour sessions, or pay to get access for longer.
Comcast claim that guest’s usage will not interrupt their customers connections because the public connection is on a separate channel that won’t take bandwidth away from the customer leasing the router.
Sharing will be switched on as default, but customers will also have the chance to opt out of providing the public wifi hotspot from their home router.
So how would you feel about sharing your home broadband?