Absolutely - I think Comcast charges like $10-15 per month for the privilege of polluting my airwaves with their access point. You can pick up one of their "approved" modems off eBay for like $50, so it pays off in a handful of months. You tell them some hardware ID number, either a MAC address or same idea, and they can auto-provision it for you. Takes literally 5 minutes and you're online.

Right now I have a Cisco DPC3008, which I can't really complain about. I have a Buffalo Airstation Extreme 1900, which has been good so far apart from its minute-long reboot times. I thought I was getting a DD-WRT router though, didn't realize the standard version did not have a supported DD-WRT build.

I have to admit though - when a contractor ripped out the sidewalks and took out my cable, I was glad that my neighbors were running the hotspot. Took almost 3 weeks to get back online.