The downside of the CableWifi roaming partneship is clearly about privacy. TheNextWeb reports that five major ISPs team up for massive Wi-Fi sharing effort across the US.
Imagine the ad targeting possibilities – with a single sign on as you roam the country, your ISP/MSO record is now going to follow you around he country. Now with a slick landing page over wifi, or a flag on your addressable cable box, your surfing and travcel habits are now even more interesting fodder for multi-screen ad targeting. It would be fascinating to know whether the CableWifi folks will be partnering with an offline/online cookie solution.
According to the article:
In what will be a massive win for US cable company subscribers, five of the country’s largest cable providers have announced that they will combine to offer each other’s customers access to their own metropolitan Wi-Fi networks — the largest such project in the US to date.
The partnership will include Bright House Networks, Cablevision, Comcast, Cox and Time Warner Cable and will include access to over 50,000 Wi-Fi hotspots across the US under the CableWiFi brand.
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In order to connect to the hotspots, subscribers simply have to look for a CableWiFi network and then connect using the same details that they use when connecting to their existing provider’s networks. Over the next couple of months, those networks will automatically connect to these networks when they are near a CableWiFi hotspot.
Reminder: free wifi is hardly EVER free.