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Comment by sethrin | Hacker News Reader

As far as I am aware, it is possible to disable the public 'xfinitywifi' hotspot on all Comcast modems which provide this feature (I had a stint as a TSR relatively recently). Further, I believe this is a user-configurable setting on all CC modems. I personally have this feature disabled on my Arris 1682G, and this should be their most common model in most regions.

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I was told I could not disable their hotspot, nor could I set my own DNS servers. Since I kept having connectivity issues due to Comcast’s DNS being flaky, and not wanting to manually configire every client, I bought my own modem and wireless setup.

You can disable the hotspot and use your own DNS servers if you want. The ability to disable the hotspot is documented in the public FAQ (Google: "XFINITY WiFi Home Hotspots FAQs").

I've used my own DNS servers before. I have no problem making DNS queries to 8.8.8.8, and in fact I switched my PC to use it one time when Comcast DNS was down.

What's the point of giving Google instructions instead of just linking https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/disable-xfinity-wif... ?

As the other person has said, they have a FAQ for disabling the hotspot. I additionally set my modem to bridge mode in order to use a more capable router. It does look like Comcast mandates the use of their DNS whenever possible, and I'm sure that I bothered to configure an alternative because of reliability issues as well.

The DNS issue was the clincher for me, but I followed their instructions for disabling it and it reappeared when the router was rebooted (not reset).

Overall, I’m rather happy with my current setup. I bought the most recent SB modem available at he time, got an Edgerouter and a Unifi AP. Took a few minutes longer to set up than a netgear or whatnot, but was able to use POE to put the AP in a far better location (it’s actually under my sofa instead of the closet where all my wiring goes) and have had a far more reliable and customizable experience.

That's not enough. Defaults are a powerful thing -- the vast majority of customers won't go through the process to disable it.

Times ... change.

It took a moment to realise you didn't terminate and stay resident.

Apologies; I never used DOS enough to retain that acronym.

Apologies, I have ;-)

Tinfoil makes a great Faraday cage

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