I use this very same feature of openwrt to load balance between my two ISPs. Here in argentina neither of the two ISP are reliable, but cheap enought if you really use then and you need reliability.
I recommend multiwan3 as the op suggest, other pkgs didnt work for me.
Some modern routers have two radios for 2.5 and 5ghz, but even with one radio openwrt allows you to set it up as client and ap.
I find other features of openwrt quite amazing like dnsmasq. It is a really powerful firmware.
I find openWRT is a really useful firmware project and I use it in any situation where it is feasible. Bandwidth Throttling / QOS is often in demand. Wireless Bridging works well. A nice side effect of using openWRT is that you sidestep many of the "backdoors" that sometimes appear (intentionally or otherwise) in stock firmware.
I also helped create a page that can help find the current most powerful routers that support WRT:
http://rooftopbazaar.com/routerfirmware/
It's such a shame that WD discontiued their MyNet range. I have a N750 and it is an awesome router with OpenWrt running. It was far more powerful (SoC + Memory) than any other router I looked at.
I bought it for AUD$50. The closest router in terms of price + power was a TP-Link for around AUD$70 and it still was behind on features.
routers are more expensive and less flexible these days. industry decided that.
what you could get for 50usd (and runs linux, reflashable with your own fw) is now around 200usd and does not support open firmwares like openwrt.
I used pfSense in a very different context (vpn gateway) and I used the vmware image option. I haven't used the multiwan feature and I don't know if it can be installed on (almost) any router as openwrt.
I did tried dd-wrt for this same purpose, the interface is much better, it is very flexible as openwrt, but I couldn't put my wifi on client and AP mode at the same time and I needed to connect to one of my WAN using wifi because that modem is not close enough yet.
that's quite disingenuous. it uses pf, openSSH, and LibreSSL (in development version) from OpenBSD on top of a FreeBSD core, and it's wireless card support is not very much below linux (though you might need to work to get it up).
if you have older x86 hardware, it's hard to top pfsense.
Xfinity says your wireline speed will not be impeded by others who are using WiFi via the xfinitywifi shared service. Since DOCSIS 3.0 has no limit on the maximum number of channels (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Bandwidth_tables ), I believe in order to make that claim, they have to allocate additional channels to the xfinitywifi traffic.
BUT OP will only double his bandwidth if he is purchasing a rate less than or equal to the actual realized throughput of his WiFi connection, somewhere from 50-90Mbps.
Additionally, all Cable modems have some kind of throttling because the speeds offered by ISPs (30x5, 100x8, etc.) are not evenly divisible by the per-channel rate of DOCSIS 2.0/3.0 (38Mbps Down, 27Mbps up).
Every modem has a finite number of channels it can bond. Up and down are different. Also the CMTS (the device the cable modem connects to) limits the number of bonds per source modem.
A piece of coax has a finite amount of bandwidth it can carry. As modulation schemes get better (QAM256) you can do more with less.
To say DOCCIS 3 is limitless is not taking into consideration the hardware and frequency constraints. The more frequency you allocate to Internet the less is available for other programming (TV).
Yes, and more than a couple of people have observed downstream 16 channel bonding on Comcast. That would be 4 times as many as you cited "Most commonly 4 channel bond on the downstream and 2 on the up", in your post that I failed to reply to.
I have Comcast 100Mb service and have 4 QAM256 bonded downstream right now. I've deployed and managed these networks (as a Comcast subsidiary in fact). 16 down doesn't mean anything other than fragmented frequency usage.
If you have a Motorola cable modem go to: 192.168.100.1 to get to the web UI of your Surfboard. Click on the "Signal" tab at the top. My guess is the majority of people will see 4 x bonded down. Probably 2-3 bonded up using a lesser QAM as well.
Not sure why all the hate - I'm a network engineer who's dealt with these networks and a lot of what's been posted here is incorrect.
Surfboard 6141 here on Comcast, and the Signal page is showing 8 QAM256 channels downstream, 4 QPSK/64QAM up. Speedtest.net has been showing 125M down/12M up for the past few months, which was a silent bump up from the 75/10 I noticed before that (Seattle Eastside area).
I'm curious how much faith to put in the speedtest numbers. Does Comcast detect speedtest, or is that what I'd really get elsewhere as well?
If you google for 100mb.bin or 1000mb.bin you'll find a lot of networks/exchanges that offer files for speedtest purposes if you want to independantly verify.
>Xfinity says your wireline speed will not be impeded by others who are using WiFi
From my experience with low throughput 2-4mbps lines I'm deeply sceptical about claims like that. Throughput will generally be OK...but if you want stable latency...good luck. The second someone else is on the same line goes flakely unless its a high powered line (fibre etc)
I also have XfinityWifi. The box that provides it is extremely buggy. I recommend setting it to "Bridge mode" (which turns it into a dumb modem) and then using OpenWRT in a normal, router configuration. You get a really good speed boost, especially over wifi, just by taking Xfinity's routing out of the equation.
Another way for "bonding" would be to use mptcp ( http://multipath-tcp.org ). You might need to patch and build openwrt yourself for it... The key difference is with mptcp each individual tcp connection uses both connections at the same time, rather than picking a lottery.
Do xfinitywifi hotspots permanently authenticate clients based only on their MAC addresses? A malicious client could easily find the MAC address of any device connected to a xfinitywifi hotspot (by using e.g. airodump-ng [0]) and then spoof that device's MAC address on their own computer to access the internet via the hotspot without any authentication.
Yes! I discovered (completely by accident) that 00:11:22:33:44:55 is authenticated to someone's account, so I just set my mac to that when I need to use their shit
That's basically the only way to do it.
If it were really clever, it could ignore packets based on vendor extensions and device characteristics. They are not that easy to spoof (you would have to modify the driver, as opposed to just changing the MAC).
I actually use this method to use school WiFi anonymously (or rather, as someone else).
Mm not entirely - I'd imagine that they could fairly easily run wpa-enterprise, authenticating against Comcast servers. Then when a user tries to connect, they'd be asked for their Comcast creds, which they could type in once, and then be authenticated with on all such servers.
It's how eduroam works, and that works fairly flawlessly (provided the routers have enough bandwidth).
Wi-Fi Alliance released a new standard to solve hotspot roaming called "Passpoint". Time Warner Cable started using it for their hotspot authentication recently (in NYC at least). It works well in my experience.
"Passpoint automates that entire process, enabling a seamless connection between hotspot networks and mobile devices, all while delivering the highest WPA2™ security. Passpoint is enabling a more cellular-like experience when connecting to Wi-Fi networks."
There is a bunch of non-broken (at least in design) client authentication protocols for WiFi. It's rarely used though since it causes problems on most devices and hard to set up (at least on win7 it didn't work for most people on my dorm).
I don't think it's permanent, but once you authenticate, any other device that can spoof the MAC address can connect. It might expire a month or so after the last connection.
I'm sorry but I can't take the author's advice on speed seriously when he's using Comcast's charge-you-every-month modem which is known to get terrible speeds to begin with. Let alone someone who is running wifi between their router and their modem.
If you want the fastest speeds on Comcast, pick up a DOCSIS 3 Motorola Surfboard modem. I'm paying for 100/20. This is what I get with my surfboard http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4251868226
Doesn't the xfinitiwifi inject ads MITM-style? I recall seeing some weird html overlays with xfinity ads on random web pages last time I browsed over one of these SSIDs.
I don't know if they inject ads, but they have the capability to do it. When I connect to an "xfinitywifi" SSID, the first HTTP page load I do will have a little "You're using XFINITY Wi-Fi. Isn't it totally awesomesauce?!"-style pop-up appear for a few seconds in the lower right corner of the browser window.
Well I definitively saw unnatural HTML content overlays in the browser, and the only explanation I can think of is that the wifi hotspot MITM-injected javascript either in .html or .js files as they were downloaded to insert these overlays. Would love to see this proved wrong though :)
There are ISPs that don't throttle your access to the neighborhood pipe? It doesn't have to be artificial, either. Just using better tech for the pipe that has to carry multiple users.
> The only way it would increase bandwidth is if it evades artificial throttles.
Well obviously. They give you a specific bandwidth for your house, you can buy more or less bandwidth if you want.
> Having two connections to the same (neighborhood) pipe seems useless.
The neighborhood pipe can probably do 100 to 1000 times the bandwidth to each individual house. So how is that useless?
Plus with xfinitywifi they allocate double bandwidth to the house, so the wifi bandwidth doesn't slow down the purchased bandwidth. (The cable modem can easily handle 10 times the bandwidth typically allocated to it.)
UPC has a similar system, where the guest network has extra bandwidth, on top of your own subscription. Even if Comcast doesn't do this, he is leeching off his neighbour's connection and not his own.
Was interested in this so I did a bit of investigation into whether it makes sense with UPC.
UPC only makes a small amount of bandwidth available on the 'Wi Free' (UPC's version of Xfinity) network, seems to be about 2.5mbps down and 0.5mbps up. In my country (Ireland), the minimum package you need to get 'Wi-Free' is 120mbps down, so It's not really worth the effort for an extra 1% bandwidth.
Neighborhood network is usually multimode fiber on the headend providing many times the per modem bandwidth, especially if they're expecting competition any time soon.
But that hotspot goes through the same line that neighbors are connected with, no? Or Comcast doesn't count the hotspot traffic towards the plan bandwidth?
That's weird. Since it defeats the purpose of expanding their WiFi hotspots coverage. If people have capped plans, they are likely to disable that hotspot altogether and use their own routers to begin with, to avoid anyone switching it back on. If they wanted such thing to work, it had to be excluded from both monthly data caps and active bandwidth limit.
That's besides the point that monthly caps is a completely nasty rip off. Luckily I never had one. Are they common in Comcast network?
> That's weird. Since it defeats the purpose of expanding their WiFi hotspots coverage. If people have capped plans, they are likely to disable that hotspot altogether and use their own routers to begin with, to avoid anyone switching it back on. If they wanted such thing to work, it had to be excluded from both monthly data caps and active bandwidth limit.
I think what he's trying to say is that as an individual using the xfinitywifi network the traffic counts towards your data cap. As the person hosting the access point, other people using it does not count towards your cap.
It doesn't count toward your bandwidth either. The neighborhood line has much more bandwidth that is allocated to each individual house. So they just allocate double bandwidth to house, and you get 1 of it, and the wifi gets the other.
I pay for a business account (but I work from home). No caps, no torrent or other throttling, no port blocking (back in the days when I ran my own mail server), optional static IPs. But you definitely pay for it.
In my area, there are wireless access points mounted on some telephone poles which provide WiFi hotspots for anyone with credentials from a major local ISP.
Apart from that, my understanding is that Comcast routers broadcast your network and also broadcast this comcast hotspot network, and they are metered (and presumably capped) independently. So with this hack you would use only your equipment, you're just taking advantage of both networks that are being broadcast by your router.
It may be that connections though xfinitywifi don't count against the neighbors allocated bandwidth and won't degrade their service since their router and connection support more than their allocated bandwidth. Can anyone confirm if this is the case?
It works because he has access to two separate networks and can load balance between the two. His neighbors could be using any ISP. So long as his router can also connect to their network, he can load balance between their wireless network and his wired network. If his router had three radios, he could load balance between to upstream wireless networks and his own downstream network.
My point was, in this setup, if his neighbor was not a Comcast customer, then he would not have any legitimate authorization to connect to the xfinitywifi network through his neighbor's router.
I don't have a lot of confidence in Comcast to have set it up so that connections to the xfinitywifi network do not impact the regular, private usage. It's just not in that company's style to think proactively and conscientiously about its customers.
I believe this only increases apparent bandwidth for applications which may open multiple connections at the same time, like web browsing and BitTorrent.
I just had comcast to my home last week. I pay for 120 mbps but when connected via cat 5 it only reached 90 max mbps which would fine considering when using a wifi router it only reaches around 30 mbps. I have moved around the wifi router but it doesn't make much of a difference. The technician told me the 120 mbps that I am being charged for is for for direct access and wifi won't reach 120mbps. I complained to customer care saying if I go to the grocery store and pay for 120 items, I expect to get 120 items, not 30 items. I told them they should tell people upfront that 120 mbps is when you are plugged in directly since most people use a wifi router but this still doesn't make sense to me since they can easily downgrade you to, say, 6 mbps without a problem.
Does anyone know if this OpenWRT works? I would love to push my speed to its limits. Comcast pretty much has a monopoly in my city and they are not very helpful.
I don't see the problem. If you paid for 120 items and you can't carry them in your car, it's not the grocery store's fault, even if "most people" used small cars.
If you want to get a better Wifi connection, get a good router and plug it in to the one installed by Comcast.
Personally, I got an Asus router as well so this does not affect me. However, I can understand this from an average customer's point of view. It would be nice for the ISP to give a router that is good enough for the speed that they advertise. The router should not be the bottleneck.
But the port needs to support the full 120. Cabling problems are on him, but if the builtin wifi can't do 120 to anything, then that's misleading advertising. Wifi is entirely capable of 120, and it's not something you can check until it's already delivered and failing.
If the grocery store makes a big deal out of having staff to carry groceries to your car, and how they sell 120 groceries, they had better be able to carry all 120 to cars that support it.
It's extremely rare for OpenWRT to magically make your wifi connection's raw speed faster. It's good for many things, but not that.
Wifi is extremely finicky, due to interference and the FCC's limits on legal transmit power levels. But you should be able to get same-room speeds of at least 180 megabits if you have a decent router and a client that supports it. The key things are you need to use a 5 GHz radio and (for distance) channel numbers >100. Many ISPs still give out 2.4 GHz-only radios, so performance will suck.
It sounds like you just may have a few things to learn about how networking works. Comcast is selling you a coax line into your house and, if you rent their modem, giving you an ethernet interface to it. It isn't making any claims about what happens after that. They can't have control over all your networking hardware and how you configure it.
I may have a few things to learn about how networking works. However, I was just stating the facts. A technician came out to re-configure to see if the issues of speed could be resolved. They did, and technician said... speed test is hitting ~93/120 mbps or so when wired in but the speed over wifi was much less while the specs say it is capable of doing 120 mbps without a problem. The tech actually said it isn't going to reach 120 mbps over wifi. If they don't have control, how is it they can "flip a switch" while on the phone to put you at 25 mbps or less, if you ask to downgrade? I believe when you buy 120 mbps that they are advertising they are claiming you will hit this speed if you are paying for it. I didn't see any disclaimer next to the 120 mbps saying "speed will be substantially less if using wifi router."
This isn't a Comcast issue. Their demarc (the divide between where service is delivered and your network) is the cable modem.
You could of course make the argument that you bought some combined cable modem/router/wifi AP box from them and it should "just work" - but you're just going to talk until you're blue in the face. Simply think of them as a pipe provider (not your IT support) and you'll be a lot happier.
What they provide is in general crap, and costing you money you can save off the monthly rental fee by providing your own equipment. This will also generally result in better performance.
I suggest buying a Surfboard 6183 (or lesser, depending on your area), and the wireless router of your choice. I recommend for simplicity sake the Apple Airport extreme or any quality 802.11n (or 802.11ac if your laptop supports it) router. Your network should look something like Cable from wall -> DOCSIS Modem -> Your wifi router. The only time you should be calling comcast is when the actual cable modem cannot obtain a lease and/or internet is in general failing.
Relying on Comcast to manage your CPE is just a plan for disaster. If your wired tests are getting 100Mbps, then the problem is on your end.
30 mbps is about what you would expect over 802.11g.
You may want to investigate a driver issue on your PC. Another scenario that may give you poor speed over wireless is interference from neighboring access points. There are utilities available to view the channels used by access points within range. If you are on a channel that is crowded you may benefit from manually specifying the channel in your router.
Cat5 has a max throughput of 100mbps. 802.11g wifi (probably what you're using) has a max throughput of 54mbps.
Either buy a Cat5e/Cat6 cable or change your wifi access point to use 802.11n. I am connected to my 2007 Airport Extreme at 300mbps right now using 802.11n.
TL;DR almost any Ethernet cable you buy today will be cat5e or better, which will work just fine. Really old cat5 is technically compatible and should work too, but due to it having slacker tolerances for e.g. crosstalk, it might not work over e.g. longer runs or difficult situations (cable ran next to fluorescent lights, etc).
EDIT: If you want to know what speed your link-level has established, your OS should provide this info. netstat -e on windows or netstat -i on OSX / Linux should show the connection speed. In windows, you could also do WinKey+ r -> ncpa.cpl -> right-click active internet connection -> connection details IIRC.
Now that the op has published this workaround, I have the feeling that Comcast will take steps to stop this from happening. Comcast's version of "customer service."
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this in the thread but you can actually opt out of the xfinitiwifi thing. The deal is that you can use any of the hotspots if you have a comcast account and also share your router. If you opt out, you can no longer use the xfinitiwifi hotspots but nobody can use yours either.
Have you tried opting out? When my dad did, he ran into a mess of broken links and incorrect support pages. Eventually he got someone to opt him out over the phone... only to have the "xfinitywifi" network pop back up the next day. It took a few more tries to have it actually disabled once and for all.
I imagine the less technically-inclined would have given up a lot earlier in the process.
Actually, that did happen to me and I ended up just forgetting about it. At the time I also wondered if it was intentional.
In fact I've noticed conveniently broken web pages from multiple large corporations. I've ran into this issue when attempting to access privacy policies and other disclosures.
There certainly may be something nefarious about this. Comcast could certainly get away with it.
If they have that much trouble taking the flags off of people's accounts, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that there's no codified correlation between "has the AP running" flag and the "is running a Comcast router+modem" flag.
I set up service with my own equipment from the start, and after all the account setup I received a dozen notices that all these wifi points were available. It was never specified as a "must have a Comcast router" condition.
I've successfully disabled xfinity wifi on my router. You have to do it through your comcast.com account instead of through the router admin. After updating your account, Comcast will remote disable the xfinity wifi on the router.
Not sure that this is the case. I guess it depends on what opting out is. I never called anyone to opt out, though I did turn it off in the modem itself. Then a few months later I bought a new modem entirely and returned the Comcast one. At no point then or now did I lose the ability to connect to other xfinitywifi's.
If this is the case, then would it be more efficient to connect to your own router with the second connection and just allocate the extra channels to yourself?
Could something like this (two ISP connections) be combined to use the speed of both links at once (i.e. speed up a single connection). Perhaps with the aide of a remote VPS?
Very cool. In practice, unless you live next to a coffee shop, there'd almost never be anyone connected to your xfinity wifi network, so you'd get the full bandwidth anyhow. Although, if your neighbor has xfinity wifi, it'd be a smart way to leach off your neighbor's bandwidth.
Also, because your router is a routed client of the xfinity wifi network, I'd imagine there'd be a big increase in latency. It'd be interesting to see the before/after speed test results.
It sounds like a creative way to get around bandwidth allocations.
My service is 3Mbps. My modem & my hardline are both capable of much more, but I only pay for 3Mbps so I only get 3Mbps. I think this trick is basically allowing the author to tap into the unallocated extra modem & line capacity that is currently used to feed xfinitywifi.
I think you can connect to your neighbors xfinity hotspot without using up any of their private bandwidth allocation. The hotspot connection gets its own.
What the author doesn't realize is he's doubled nothing. DOCCIS networks are shared mediums. That means you have to double bandwidth by increasing the number of channels you have. Newer DOCCIS modema are already bonding channels today. Most commonly 4 channel bond on the downstream and 2 on the up. By connecting to the cable modem twice, via two different routes, does nothing to change the available bandwidth available to the users behind the CPE (cable modem). As some have stated you could do this against your neighbors modem to share more channels on the cable media, however your neighbor is on the same HFC node and sharing the same available bandwidth to how many other users are connected to that node. You may get a few extra megabit but its the latency that will make that portion of the link "slower" so you really won't improve things much, if at all.
The best way to improve consumer Internet connection is to get a fast router that can route fast in hardware. I'm always amazed people think a SOHO device doing WiFi, NAT, DHCP, DNS, etc. on gimped hardware is "fast". The majority of time it's not and real improvements can be realized with dedicates hardware. Meaning that until you split service off from routing using cheap, consumer SOHO gear, will most always be the bottleneck.
Having worked with deployment of these networks (DOCCIS 3) for a Comcast subsidiary I can tell you this is not true. If you have 10Mb the non-guest network is prioritized. But you cannot use more than 10Mbit between the two. As stated, the author has doubled nothing.
> Does the new Home Hotspot impact my Internet speeds or data usage?
> The broadband connection to your home will be unaffected by the new feature.
Doesn't sound consistent with the prioritization claim since prioritization still implies the speed may be affected by the guest network. If you're right, then that's kind of a bold (misleading) thing for Comcast to say in their FAQ.
If the author is doing this by using the neighbor's WiFi (as mentioned in some other comments), then I don't see how this has anything to do with XFINITY WiFi specifically, or any loopholes - stealing bandwidth from a neighbor could be done (in theory) with any open/accessible WiFi connection of a neighbor.
The author doesn't implicitly state this, only that his neighbor also has it. You're still failing to understand that a $50 SOHO router has a cheap transceiver and getting to your neighbors guest network is far more latent and prone to dropped packets and errors due to the distance. Also the embedded transceiver in the cable modem is competing with a lot of local RF from the cable modem.
Again, he's not doubling his bandwidth based on the above and a whole host of other reasons beyond these.
For those who try I'd say post true bandwitdh and latency test comparisons using multiple sessions that are shown using both links. Its actually pretty funny to me, having been in network engineering for well over a decade, that people are so passionate that they're sticking it to Comcast and "doubling" bandwidth with nothing to back it up. But, whatever floats your boat.
As stated above even if he is doing that its implied, not a direct statement. Assume away. Also, doing this will actually make your connection worse as that connection will always be more latent.
Think of it this way. When you stream a movie from Netflix it is one TCP session. Not 5, 10, etc. So if you load balance to your neighbor your stream will be worse by default. This is not equal cost load balancing, this is a hack that isn't what it seems and there are a lot of people commenting that have, apparently, little to no knowledge about basic network fundamentals.
Try it and prove you've doubled your bandwidth. There are tens of logical reasons why this doesn't work.
Think kd it this way. When you stream a movie from Netflix it is one TCP session. Not 5, 10, etc. So if you load balance to your neighbor your stream will be worse by default.
Like others have pointed out, Linux doesn't load balance a single connection over multiple WANs, so as long as the Netflix stream gets on the best link, it'll be better since it'll have to compete with fewer connections (since some will be routed over the other link).
4 lane highway vs 1 lane dirt road. While combining the two makes the number of paths greater the paths themselves are not equal (my equal cost load balancing remark). So, if the router is not taking link cost into account, which it is not, you'll actually have worse performance over all of your connections because the router will try to balance them equally on session start. This means that 50% of the time you start out going to your neighbors connection and fail or go slow. It's actually more advantageous to wait for a spot on the wide, fast link than it would be to take the alternate path.
If the router was taking into account link reliability and speed (overall cost) it would only give a small percentage of connections to the worse link and only if the main link was saturated from a bandwidth perspective. None of this is happening by round robin load balancing which means more of your connections are worse. This is why routing protocols that have these features exist.
In the general case, sure, though I was replying to your specific example. That said, the software he uses for load balancing (mwan3) does support different weights for each wan connection, it's just a matter of configuration.
Sure. So admit you were wrong first, then explain the defensible position you meant to give.
Your comments are clearly not kind or necessary, and not all of them are even true. You might wish to rethink your commenting strategy, because you're clearly smart and I would rather that your opinion not be lost entirely.
Is the router really a likely bottleneck? From everything I've read, it's rare for even a $40 router not to achieve 70mbps, which is more than the average connection offers.
I just bought a TP-Link TL-WR841N and it has no problem maxing out my 30mbps connection, even with some extra LAN traffic.
>I'm always amazed people think a SOHO device doing WiFi, NAT, DHCP, DNS, etc. on gimped hardware is "fast".
I'm a big fan of my TP-Link WDR4300. I can easily max out my 250/60Mbps uplink while it's also doing NAT and some light firewalling, in software. It also runs all of my IPAM (DHCP/DNS). Additionally, it also runs OpenVPN (and can do ~20Mbps of encrypted bandwidth) and a BGP session (using Quagga) over that VPN to my local hackerspace. All in a single OpenWRT device that's sub $70.
Is it equivalent in performance to a hardware router? Of course not. But these start at a few thousand dollars (even Cisco ASA and Juniper SRX class hardware does its routing in software...).
This is all well and good until you start doing anything with address sensitive replies. For example a VoIP call would need some way of anchoring the packets to a specific connection for the duration of the call (some kind of session pinning would be ideal).
I like the idea but I wonder how it performs on many use cases (like Skype or online gaming).
routing should be 'sticky' to an ip address; connections to any given ip address should use the same outbound route for the duration of that connection.
Linux outgoing network traffic load-balancing is performed on a per-IP connection basis – it is not channel-bonding, where a single connection (e.g. a single download) will use multiple WAN connections simultaneously
Ahh cool! That's way better. I thought it was just channel bonding.
I can still easily imagine a conflict where your signaling IP and your media IP are different in VoIP, but binding connections to IP addresses is pretty reasonable.
I think it's noteworthy only because of how wide spread Comcast's newer router's are becoming, specifically in dense areas in the United States. It's a technique that obviously isn't ground breaking or that technical, but it's actually viable because of these new routers Comcast is renting out as their standard router now.
I live in a typical neighborhood in Chicago; houses are spaced apart enough to where you don't get a ton of wifi overlap, but enough to see a handful of your neighbors networks. I noticed the first "XfinityWifi" network about mid/late last year and now will see between 2 - 3 from my house. I found this post interesting because of how he is leveraging these, relatively, open connections.
xfinitywifi is provided by Comcast, you need a valid comcast login to connect. He is a Comcast subscriber himself, and thus he has a valid Comcast login.
Using Comcast with your own equipment and none owned by any one else outside your home? I'm not a lawyer.
Anything else including what the author describes, using his neighbor's equipment without their permission even if he thinks Comcast has the legal authority to authorize it (and documentation in the links I provided challenges that notion) then it's not for me to say; I'm not a lawyer.
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