Selling wireless while giving it away-Why buy the cow when the milk is 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 complaining, it's FREE and allows me to experiment :-)