
What’s this xfinitywifi network and why do I keep connecting? (2016) - apsec112
http://jimmymacsupport.com/whats-xfinitywifi-network-keep-connecting/
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m463
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
In iOS 11+ you can disable this behavior.

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

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apsdsm
The only way I’ve managed to avoid my iPhone connecting to random wifi is to
go to settings:wifi and set “ask to join” to true. And now it just bugs me
with prompts a hundred times every train ride.

Ifaik there’s no other way to stop autoconnecting to wifi that matches certain
conditions, and it drives me up the wall.

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ilikehurdles
Have you tried leaving "ask to join" off, and forgetting the problematic
network? If you rarely if ever need to connect to it, it's better that you
don't save it to your list of known networks.

The other way I see from the other comment is to view that SSID in your wifi
menu, click the (i) button next to it, and toggle "auto-join".

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apsdsm
I tried this initially but new wifi networks kept springing up with such
frequency that the whole thing became a game of whack-a-mole. Maybe they
rotate names frequently here? I might give it another shot though. There can’t
be _that_ many wifi networks between here and Roppongi...

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ilikehurdles
My iPhone only ever connects to networks I've used -- never unknown open
networks. I know it's possible to enable automatic asking (I think, via "ask
to join network"?), but that seems like an annoying feature.

~~~
apsdsm
Yeah, I think it’s trying to connect to networks that are somehow “partners”
with my provider, and for some reason there seems to be hundreds of these
scattered around Tokyo.

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lebrad
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
Seriously had the same experience.

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sl1ck731
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.

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peter303
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.

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u801e
Does this apply if you're using your own modem/router?

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colanderman
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.)

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Fnoord
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.

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thrower123
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.

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altmind
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.

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owl57
So, someone can just spoof that mac address and have their activity logged as
yours? What could possibly go wrong?

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asveikau
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.

~~~
owl57
Thinking about this again, there's a bit of difference: most people running a
Tor exit node probably made a conscious decision to take this risk.

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jchw
>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.

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ars
> 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.

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jchw
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.

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Spare_account

      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.

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kalleboo
> _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)

