Home Hotspots: Neighborly Gesture or Trojan Horse?

Abstract

Following the continued expansion of the cable industry during the past six decades, cable companies, known for wired services, now strive to reach out for wireless consumers by providing “public” WiFi networks in metropolitan areas. Despite the fact that cable’s WiFi initiative could alleviate wireless network congestion and save on both carriers’ infrastructure costs and consumers’ mobile data service expenses, we may not simply applaud their movement due to a dubious business model of cable WiFi, called “home hotspot.”

U.S. cable operators have deployed more than 250,000 public WiFi hotspots across the country. An agreement among major MSOs allows customers to access each other’s hotspots, which include the WiFi gateways in Comcast’s subscriber homes. Turning home routers into public WiFi access points to build a far-reaching wireless network open to all subscribers raises substantive policy issues, as well as consumer concerns. Nonetheless, since that program has been successful for Comcast – approaching one million activations, others are naturally considering it.

Comcast emphasizes that there is no diminution of its customers’ private service quality because gateway partitioning technology will create two separate WiFi signals, one for private home use and the other for public use. In addition, it claims to always prioritize private service and make its best effort to prevent possible security problems. Then, no harm, no foul? The home hotspot initiative is an opt-out program, which the customer is often not aware of, implying that there is little incentive for customers to opt in the program with their fears and concerns left behind. As opposed to Comcast’s assertion, it might be inevitable for the bandwidth to the participating household to be compromised when the public portion of the service is engaged in heavy offloading, as long as the two WiFi network segments share the same spectrum band. Other than this service quality concern, there are many more issues, which make the home hotspot model deserve more and deeper scrutiny before it becomes a universal practice.

Therefore, this proposed study will attempt an issue mapping concerning the cable WiFi deployment and, based on the constructed issue map, address the questions of how this developmental phase of WiFi (and issues involved) fits the historic patterns of telecommunications technologies and how it must engage cable, broadband and wireless policy in order to harmonize consumer, corporate and public interests. The framework for this analysis is Debora L. Spar’s (2001) four-phase approach. This approach posits that new technologies follow a cyclical developmental pattern consisting of four different phases: innovation, commercialization, creative anarchy, and demand for rules. The phase of creative anarchy, in particular, well demonstrates how the technology in question matures by involving many players and why those players get to demanding rules.

Clearly, cable WiFi initiatives raise many important issues including quality of service, security (e.g., signal theft), corporate responsibility, liability for misuse, customer education and compensation, spectrum allocation, wireless competition and monetization of public networks. All of these issues are related to consumer protection and the public interest, possibly necessitating government actions, as well as private solutions. This paper will provide a meaningful discussion of what to consider in adopting and using cable WiFi to minimize possible fallout.

Keywords: WiFi, cable WiFi, hotspots, quality of service, security