Xfinity WiFi Home Hotspot FAQs

Xfinity WiFi Home Hotspot FAQs
comcast.com

It's a good feature. The open wifi is separated from your wifi, and it doesn't use your bandwidth. Plus - If you have BT wifi, you get to use all those hotspots for free.

If you're paying for the highest speed BT offers at your location and you're near the limit for that speed, they don't have any capability to overprovision a few extra mbps on that circuit for guest Wi-Fi use. The closest they can do is provision a new circuit entirely, but that isn't a very cost-effective solution just to provide Wi-Fi as it requires another physical pair, another DSLAM port, and more expensive CPE that can support 2 pairs.

Comcast on the other hand is a cable provider and due to the shared architecture of DOCSIS, can conceivably do that. In fact, since they're saying guest Wi-Fi users will not impact your connection speed, I am betting that is exactly what they are doing - guest Wi-Fi users probably have access to any unused capacity on the node.

* maybe they have FTTP in some areas (like pretty much every telco) in which case this won't apply. And I know they have FTTC in many areas too, but that's still xDSL and these shortcomings still apply (just to a lesser extent since the loops are much shorter).

This brings up some interesting questions. Consider 6 residents in an apartment building, each with their own Comcast Internet connection. I utilize my private network and the other 5 people for whatever strange reason chose to connect to my Xfinity WiFi connection instead of their own connection. One of them surfs for highly illegal content (take your pick). Whose door are the police going to break down?