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[SOLVED] 139 Clients Connecting Through My PC? Don't Think So

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Bulldog

Regular Contributor
I'm really happy with my RT-AC68U. No complaints. But there is this one little thing:

My desktop PC connects to the router with an Ethernet cable. My PC does not have a WiFi adapter. So imagine my surprise when my router's network map told me that there were 139 clients connecting to my router through my PC. I don't think so.

Must be a one-off, I thought, so I powered off and powered on the router and the 139 clients disappeared. However, just now I checked my router's Network Map again, and this is what I saw:

Asus.PNG


How is this happening? (I'm on the latest firmware: 3.0.0.4.385.20632)

Then, I remembered something:

I live in the United States and my ISP is Comcast (although not for much longer.) Comcast has this insidious practice whereby they use the antennas on their customers' routers as public WiFi hotspots. Anyone passing by can connect to such a Comcast hotspot, and their traffic flows between the customer's antenna and Comcast's own modem. Third parties using this public hotspot service cannot connect to the customer's LAN - or so Comcast promises - and no traffic flows through the customer's LAN.

This is what accounts for the extra clients connecting to my router, and explains why I do not see any unrecognized MAC addresses in my router's log of DHCP addresses.

In the past, Comcast customers could opt out of letting Comcast use their routers' antennas as public hotspots, but no longer.
 
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