Selling services that are free

Puzzled as to why a major provider would keep two open routers, major brands,
allowing anyone to configure and connect while they are selling
the same, but faster services in the same city. This appears to be a mesh network?
Is this common?

They run at about 3MB but throttle down to very low download speeds during
certain scheduled hours, while their upload speeds remain fairly
constant.

Not a complaint, it's FREE and allows me to experiment :-)

(apologies for any repetitions of this post, it's a reliability thing)

In message <(E-Mail Removed) ux.net>
starwars <(E-Mail Removed)> was claimed to have
wrote:

>Puzzled as to why a major provider would keep two open routers, major brands,
>allowing anyone to configure and connect while they are selling
>the same, but faster services in the same city. This appears to be a mesh network?
>Is this common?
>
>They run at about 3MB but throttle down to very low download speeds during
>certain scheduled hours, while their upload speeds remain fairly
>constant.
>
>Not a complaint, it's FREE and allows me to experiment :-)
>
>(apologies for any repetitions of this post, it's a reliability thing)

Are these city-wide routers, or did someone buy ISP server and leave
their router configured without any authentication?

In other words, what makes you think it's the major provider doing this?