Comcast sued for turning home Wi-Fi routers into public hotspots

Two East Bay (CA) residents are suing Comcast for plugging their home’s wireless router into what they call a power-wasting, Internet-clogging, privacy-threatening network of public Wi-Fi hotspots.

The class-action suit claims Comcast is “exploiting them for profit” by using their Pittsburgh home’s router as part of a nationwide network of public hotspots. The suit quotes a test conducted by Philadelphia networking technology company Speedify that concluded the secondary Internet channel will eventually push “tens of millions of dollars per month of the electricity bills needed to run their nationwide public Wi-Fi network onto consumers.” Tests showed that under heavy use, the secondary channel adds 30 to 40 percent more costs to a customer’s electricity bill than the modem itself, the suit said. The suit also said “the data and information on a Comcast customer’s network is at greater risk” because the hotspot network “allows strangers to connect to the Internet through the same wireless router used by Comcast customers.”