Alex here, and, while that's a good observation, it's not that simple. As I described, this was the business setup. Comcast gave me two cable modems, one for my office and one for the Xfinity hotspot. The power I measure was solely for the hardware that was required to run the Xfinity hotspot. The question is, how different is the setup of consumers? They do share one modem, but in my experience most people are supplying their own wifi router (by linksys or similar) to give themselves a wifi network, in which case the fixed overhead of Comcast's wifi router is entirely there to supply the Xfinity Wifi.

Thanks for asking, this was part of a campaign to sign up technically sophisticated beta testers for our new VPN product. I came to slashdot because of the concentration of such networking experts. The casual, ask me anything, tone was set specifically to disarm the frequent, negative posters who frequently post without contributing to the discussion in a meaningful way. At this moment, I have now signed up 249 people for the Switchboard beta (thank you everyone, we won't let you down). Thanks for your post.

Interesting, thank you. In general I think the trust/privacy issues are bigger here on Slashdot than they are in the rest of the Internet (I submit Facebook's success as evidence). I think the subscription part was a bigger deal to more people. That said you clearly have a valid point, and your stories about those other products are clearly nightmarish. I'm going to keep this in mind going forward. And I get that nothing I say here will make you trust me. So are there standards/trusted 3rd parties, whose seal of approval would make you believe in our security/trustworthiness?

Thanks, Chas.

Thank you for asking. Yes, so in the new form, we're pushing it largely as a personal VPN. It's very easy to setup, and automatically does the same sort of firewall traversal (STUN, TURN, different ports, etc.) that Google Talk or Skype does to get through a firewall. So you can get a VPN server setup without having to deal with port forwarding on your router, or anything like that. We are smart about our channel bonding and protocols. As long as it's possible, we'll use UDP and get much better speeds than you would get with a TCP based solution. It does have the multiple Internet connection stuff going as well. Yes, for that to improve your performance, you have to set up your server somewhere with a very fast Internet connection. There are a lot of situations where this comes up: places where DSL is still common, and where you have a very mobile workforce, a lot of times people have access to both Wi-Fi and 4G or DSL and 4G.