Comcast, Plume, and the next step for ISP Wi-Fi
Broadband ISPs have been painted into a corner for a long time when it comes to Wi-Fi. If you're a broadband ISP and you don't offer Wi-Fi, hordes of your customer base will leave you for a competitor who does. But if you're a broadband ISP and you do offer Wi-Fi, you've just given your customer a good reason to hate you that has nothing to do with your core business model - they have dead spots in their house that your gateway device's radios don't reach, and it's your problem, because you told the customer that you'd handle their Wi-Fi.
As a technical enthusiast, it's easy to think "well, yeah, ISP Wi-Fi always sucks" and not even bother your ISP about it - you just go to the store, look for something better, and take the burden onto your own shoulders as though the ISP never offered Wi-Fi in the first place. But that's not how most consumers think - which, for many years now, has left ISPs footing the bill for support calls and truck rolls for a problem that isn't actually their core business and that they're not particularly well-equipped to solve.
Comcast and lots of other ISP's are pushing WiFi because Verizon Wireless, at&t, T-Mobile and a lot of other cellular providers are looking to WiFi connections provided by their customers to solve a very expensive problem.
Cellular phones are worming their way into the pockets of late adopters like me, and we, as a class, are demanding and suspicious buyers. We're likely to ask rude questions when the radio transceiver we just bought to take the place of our reliable POTS line starts droping calls every time our car turns a corner.
So, the cellular giants are doing a quick end-run around the problem: rather than buy all those oh-so-expensive hilltops and put in all those cellular towers, theyr'e quietly putting "Work-via-wifi" options in their phones, and encouraging their users to pay for the infra- structure that we thought we were getting along with the cell phone.
Never mind that the "femtocells" we're all loaning to the cellular gods for free are useless more than ten feet beyond our houses: they've figured the odds, and they know that it's "close enough" to the habits of their late-adoptees that they'll be able to sell it long enough to be rich and gone - when the ISP's demand their cut, and start taking it out of the pockets of the users who were paying the bill all along. Those users will, in turn, seek other options: namely, the "4G" or "5G" whichever "g" the cell carriers will sell them - for slightly less than the new prices that the ISPs will be charging.
Bill Horne Moderator