Comcast Makes It More And More Difficult To Opt-Out Of Internet Sharing.
Here’s how to opt out: Buy your own cheap wi-fi router. Set it up as an access point and connect it to any of your Comcast router’s LAN ports with a patch cable.
Put a metal colander over the Comcast device and place the router itself on some aluminum foil. This is a Faraday cage, so the signal will be attenuated to ~1m or less.
To avoid being double-NATted (which can cause problems with some services), place the IP address of your new wireless access point in the DMZ of the Comcast router.
I recommend this model as it’s cheap and very reliable.
It costs $50 to defeat that evil empire, but sometimes it’s Comcast or nothing so most people can’t just switch. And this will kill the empire’s wi-fi, but let you have your own still without strangers leeching it and doing who knows what.
So, I take it Big Phone (ATT&T in my market) is a lesser evil than Big Cable? An upstart option here is WOW!, which has the virtue of being a smaller entity, although I find their salescritters pushy even by telcom/cable industry standards, and they’re based in Colorado Springs, which is the capital of Evangelical America.
Right now I’m using a tethered (pre-paid) phone as a cheap (?) substitute for actual internet access. Is this one of those cases where I’m not really missing anything? Do the customer service and contract hassles outweigh the additional (in theory) bandwidth?