[ale] OT: Comcast Wi-Fi

Fri Apr 25 16:58:15 EDT 2014

Your belief that big corporations don’t do things without proper planning is quite simply wrong.    I know this from having worked at both Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies.   You can ride the unicorn while continuing to believe what you believe but I started out by noting it didn’t match my EXPERIENCE.   Sure they’ll have more procedure written up and folks like me will try to insure they don’t do stupid things but on occasion when a Senior VP says “do it” you have to do it and undo it later when they find out externally why you were objecting internally.

Check out the history of GlaxoSmithKline and its Puerto Rico manufacturing facility.   Even though it nearly got them shutdown several years ago and they made a big effort to address the FDAs concerns back then it was only a year or so ago that I again saw this very same facility being gigged by the FDA again.

Remember a few years back when one of the big banks (Chase I think it was) started sending out unsolicited credit cards to all its customers without first notifying them they were coming?

Did the engineers at Firestone or GM own up to why the GM SUVs were rolling over or did they spend time finger pointing at each other?

One benefit of a free press is it highlights some of the worst things that occur and that makes companies deal with the problems.  (GM finally did do a recall over the ignition issue,  Both GM and Firestone finally did work on solving the problem on their end and ignoring each other,  The bank did stop sending the cards (which also now is illegal) all due to the press stories lambasting their responses.

No benefit?  Comcast is advertising this “free wifi” to gain/keep customers so of course there is a benefit:   Money.

Note that I didn’t say Comcast is in fact doing anything illegal, unethical or stupid because I don’t know.   I just said that one shouldn’t assume they or any corporation are not doing one of those things based on a rosy colored view of the world that does match the abundant evidence to the contrary about corporations in general.

From: ale-bounces at ale.org<mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org> [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Brian Mathis
Sent: Friday, April 25, 2014 3:50 PM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] OT: Comcast Wi-Fi

On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 1:03 PM, Lightner, Jeff <JLightner at dsservices.com<mailto:JLightner at dsservices.com>> wrote:
Saying things done by corporations are not stupid or unethical or illegal doesn’t match my experience at all.

I like how you linked those 3 concepts even though they are distinctly separate.  Being stupid is ignorance, and being unethical is frowned upon.  Neither of them are illegal.

Just because it would be “obvious” to people that think that things should be a certain way is no reason to believe that they are that way.    Most corporations are more interested in rolling out new things quickly than they are in insuring they don’t do them stupidly.    Assuming that they might actually NOT gouge you by charging you for the bandwidth they are providing to others would be foolhardy.   Whether they would do that by design (which is feasible) or by lack of attention to detail (which is also feasible) would be anyone’s guess.   I’ve had to call Comcast on more than one occasion after seeing the antics they’ve played with my bills.

I don't say it's obvious because I live in a world of unicorns and have no basis for such an opinion.  It's obvious because if they didn't do those things, they'd be getting sued left and right and you'd already be hearing about huge class-action lawsuits against them, especially given the increased scrutiny Comcast is receiving lately.
Services like this take a long time to be developed in a company -- it's not some guy who just decided to stick extra wifi chips in cable modems.  Anything this big would have to go through all sorts of internal hurdles, and given the size of my Comcast bill, I'm sure they have plenty of money for lawyers and engineers to make sure things are implemented correctly, both technically and to minimize liability.  One thing you can say about Comcast is that, given the number of customers they support, the service generally performs well and is technically sound (video on demand notwithstanding).

If you don’t think corporations do things to maximize their profits I’ll point out the recent article mentioning how very large banks (Chase, Wells Fargo, and Bank of America all mentioned) are posting transactions that overdraft your account from largest to smallest rather than chronologically to insure you end up paying more overdraft fees on smaller (yet chronologically earlier) checks.   They were previously caught doing exactly the same thing with debit card transactions but I think that got outlawed when they did some of the hasty banking reforms back in 2008/2009.

Or look at the fact that GM is only now recalling parts that have been known to kill people over a long period of years.

Way to setup a huge straw man here.  No one said that corporations don't try to maximize profit, or that they don't do illegal things (and neither of those things you mentioned are currently illegal, even if unethical).  I'm saying that *in this case*, there's just no way to do it otherwise without a huge backlash.  Also there's no profit motive for them to comingle network traffic on the same subnet as opposed to making it separate, unless you try to say that they want public users to run up your personal data cap so they can start to charge overage fees, in which case you're really descending into conspiracy theories.

Corporations are in business to make money and pretending they don’t do shady if not outright illegal actions to that end is silly given all evidence to the contrary.

There's simply no, or very little, profit to be had in this scenario (comingling network traffic vs. keeping it separate), and when compared to the risk it wouldn't be worth it.

❧ Brian Mathis

Athena®, Created for the Cause™

Making a Difference in the Fight Against Breast Cancer

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