What’s this xfinitywifi network and why do I keep connecting? (2016)

http://jimmymacsupport.com/whats-xfinitywifi-network-keep-connecting/

by apsec112 • 7 years ago

51 65 7 years ago

m463• 7 years ago

Nothing I hate more than devices auto-connecting to "partner wifi".

One day my phone browsing was interrupted by a starbucks terms-and-conditions webpage. wtf? Turns out my phone had auto-connected to an attwifi access point in range.

What's more disturbing is that companies work with "smart device" manufacturers so they can connect this way without you ever knowing.

What if your smart tv, only ever plugged into HDMI, was connecting to your neighbor's xfinitywifi without you knowing it?

briandear• 7 years ago

In iOS 11+ you can disable this behavior.

millzlane• 7 years ago

You can in android too. I have auto reconnect turned off for xfinity.

mahnouel• 7 years ago

How? By manually ignoring the Network or by deactivating WiFi in Control Center? Or is there an option I'm missing?

pja• 7 years ago

What’s worse is that these companies are tracking you using your phone wifi connections to these networks & selling that data on. (If you’re lucky, it’s only sold in aggregated form, but I bet personal data is available to insiders).

sl1ck731• 7 years ago

This is especially annoying when it hops onto a 1 bar xfinity WiFi that barely works at all, or one that I just passed by at 60 mph, instead of just using 4G. I could never get my S6 to stop connecting to them, even after doing "forget this network". Thankfully I've replaced it.

I understand what they're going for, but I'd rather have some kind of app manage it in such a way that it requires a certain strength and for me to be in the vicinity for more than a microsecond.

altmind• 7 years ago

xfinitywifi is free for anyone who already have xfinity at home. its extemely useful when you have a local internet outage.

they are great because they authenticate with login/password only once and then remember the mac addr, you dont have to log in ever again.

hope they wont start charging for this.

mercantile• 7 years ago

Agreed with this.

Comcast is a terrible company in pretty much every way, shape, and form, but xfinitywifi has been useful to me many times now as a usable fallback when nothing else is available.

Better OS-level tools to manage these connections (i.e. intelligently not connect and flag as degraded) when the signal or backing network is extremely weak would be a huge boon though.

owl572• 7 years ago

So, someone can just spoof that mac address and have their activity logged as yours? What could possibly go wrong?

markovbot• 7 years ago

Yep! Last I checked (which admittedly was a while ago), 00:00:00:00:00:01 was valid for xfinitywifi

asveikau2• 7 years ago

I feel like it could also have bad legal consequences to have your MAC associated with an xfinity account. What if somebody spoofs your MAC and does sketchy illegal things? Similar to anecdotal stories I heard about people running TOR relays and subsequently hearing from law enforcement.

aiyodev2• 7 years ago

It’s also great for iot devices. Gives them access to the internet with no access to other devices in your home. You do have to spoof their mac address on a device with a browser to get them online though.

asveikau2• 7 years ago

If you have decent routers you can do that too. For example you can create a separate ssid with different IP space and NAT.

larvaetron• 7 years ago

you dont have to log in ever again.

That isn't my experience. Every so often I visit a few locations and hop on the xfinitywifi, and I need to authenticate each time.

jchw2• 7 years ago

Users aren’t reducing your internet speed any more than a new neighbor signing up for Comcast. The technical capability of their cable network is far faster than the speed Comcast doles out to you, since you pay for a throttled speed tier. The xfinitywifi network users aren’t included in your throttled speed.

Is this actually true? I mean sure, DOCSIS 3.1 is capable of gigabit speeds in theory. But are the CPU and other resources on the modem/router actually _fully_ isolated? And coaxial cables that were laid decades ago, are they actually capable of reaching speeds fast enough to totally isolate you from bandwidth issues? Some people fail to hit their advertised speeds as is.

My guess is that the reality is, you do lose some performance and gain some latency if there's a lot of xfinitywifi traffic going through your router.

I am a Comcast customer, reluctantly, as pretty much any other Comcast customer, but I use my own hardware always. I don't like what Comcast is doing here, especially because they're not really telling you about it. Of course, as you would expect, you don't get any discount for what you are doing for them either, it's just part of life if you rent equipment, which eventually costs more than it saves anyways.

But even if you buy your own hardware, trying to feel in control can be very hard. I used to use a MikroTik hAPlite as a router, but it got hacked a couple of times, and many more vulnerabilities eventually turned me off of MikroTik products despite how nice they were to use. Then I moved to one of the actually-kinda-expensive Linksys AC2600 and boy did that stuff piss me off royally. On top of the annoying 'smart' features, including a click through EULA and requiring online registration to access my own router's configuration menu, it honestly performed terribly. Being in an apartment, I connect my desktop via WiFi, and this thing couldn't even keep a stable connection for that. Some devices wouldn't connect at all, and I never figured out why, after hours of looking through logs and troubleshooting; the hAPlite had no such issues.

So... I gave in. Surfboard SB82000 modem, Ubiquity Unifi AC and USG, and Cisco switches. It isn't cheap, and frankly it's completely ridiculous overkill. It's gotta be like, $500 worth of crap new, and it does require some additional setup, like having a machine setup to act as the controller. But, I rest a lot easier, and I have literally not had a single issue since configuring everything. Which is definitely more than I can say for any Comcast-installed equipment I've had to deal with. Good riddance.

I hope some day there's a 'sane' option for people who just want good performance, good security for home use cases, but right now I'm wondering if there will ever be anything aimed at consumers that isn't trying super hard to exploit the crap out of them. The situation with consumer internet equipment has left me very jaded, especially because I remember running DD-WRT on a WRT54G and having a great time.

Edit: It is worth noting that I never tried any of the whole home mesh WiFi solutions. I’ve heard good things, but apartments seem like unideal places to install them.

ars• 7 years ago

Is this actually true?

Yes, it is actually true. The speed of WiFi relative to coax is puny. There's no way WiFi can come close to taxing it.

I suppose you are using a bit more WiFi spectrum, but your neighbors do that too.

jchw2• 7 years ago

Oh of course, WiFi alone isn’t enough, at least probably not until the next generation of WiFi. Consider also wired traffic, though. The xfinitywifi hotspot is hosted on modem/router devices of all sorts, including Comcast Business devices.

ec109685• 7 years ago

Mesh wifi’s are a godsend. Happy Eero user since its Kickstarter.

kalleboo2• 7 years ago

I hope some day there's a 'sane' option for people who just want good performance, good security for home use cases

That used to be the Apple AirPort range...

Personally I eventually just ended up getting the router at the big box store with the biggest numbers. And it worked out fine. I get a wireless iperf result of 900 Mbit while in the same room, 300+ out in the living room. No stability issues (even with flakey chinese IoT crap on there). No intrusive features. It seems like the luck of the draw with consumer brands though. http://www.aterm.jp/product/atermstation/product/warpstar/wg...

peter303• 7 years ago

Note for comcast customers: the default on your setup is devote one fifth of your modem capacity to general xfinity wifi. So the general public can surf porn at your expense. Xfinity has settings to turn this off. However like Facebook privacy, comcast continuously turns this back on.

LeoPanthera• 7 years ago

This is misleading. It doesn't share bandwidth on the cable with your internet connection. Removing it wouldn't make your interest faster.

lotsofpulp3• 7 years ago

Where is the bandwidth coming from? Coax in general is sharing bandwidth between the whole neighborhood, hence the piss poor upload speeds and latency.

Obviously all bandwidth is shared at some point, but the extend to which coax is is ridiculous in my experience. They sell individuals hundreds of megabits download, 5 “megabit” upload, when the whole neighborhood might only have a few hundred megabits download capacity total.

It’s a joke compared to symmetric fiber connections, and that they share even more of your connection with their xfinitywifi adds to that. Hence why one should always buy and use your own cable modem.

skinnymuch• 7 years ago

Can you show where this is true? I’ve been trying to get the WiFi part enabled. Have had a hard time on current and last router. The opposite of it being enabled by default.

u801e• 7 years ago

Does this apply if you're using your own modem/router?

colanderman• 7 years ago

No. (Source: I've used my own modem & router with Comcast. There's no physical way they can force your router to host an xfinitywifi SSID.)

MrMember• 7 years ago

I bought my own modem and router specifically to not deal with this garbage.

lebrad• 7 years ago

Comcast piggybacked an xfinitywifi hotspot on the Comcast Business router they installed for me.

When I asked Comcast to turn off the hotspot, they told me to disable xfinitywifi using the Comcast Business web-based administration page. However, toggling the options on the page failed to disable their hotspot.

Comcast said that I had discovered a bug, and that as a workaround they could disable the hotspot manually from their end. This also failed to work.

In the end, I had them replace the router with a much older wired-only model.

beauzero• 7 years ago

Seriously had the same experience.

Fnoord• 7 years ago

Answer: Free WLAN for Comcast customers (USA cable telco).

Just like KPN Fon, Ziggo, EMS Hotspot, and Wifi in de trein in The Netherlands, and very likely a plethora of other countries and businesses have such a feature as well.

Use with a VPN, and you can make it secure. With Wireguard, you can make it reliable. Other than that, I'd be careful for MITM attacks.

Spare_account• 7 years ago

  iOS:
  While in range of the xfinitywifi network, tap Settings > Wi-Fi.
  Tap the (i) to the right of the xfinitywifi network.
  Tap “Forget this network”

Is it still the case that you can't 'Forget' a Wifi network on iPhone devices unless you're in range of the network?

I recall this being a fact when I had an iPhone some time ago.

masklinn• 7 years ago

Yeah. AFAIK there's no way to access a list of all known networks.

kalleboo2• 7 years ago

Is it still the case that you can't 'Forget' a Wifi network on iPhone devices unless you're in range of the network?

AFAIK, yes. The only exception is if you have a Mac logged into the same iCloud account, you can forget it on the Mac which does have a full list (and WiFi credentials are synced)

thrower123• 7 years ago

One of the main reasons I bought my own modem rather than using the one Comcast provides is to avoid broadcasting this terrible xfinitywifi network. It's not worth the liability.

What’s this xfinitywifi network and why do I keep connecting? (2016)

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