Do xfinitywifi hotspots permanently authenticate clients based only on their MAC addresses? A malicious client could easily find the MAC address of any device connected to a xfinitywifi hotspot (by using e.g. airodump-ng [0]) and then spoof that device's MAC address on their own computer to access the internet via the hotspot without any authentication.
How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT
61–70 of 148 posts
Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT
#62Am I the only one that sees missing letters? http://s2.postimg.org/vpba0a1wp/image.png
I'm not missing letters, but lowercase Rs look like knives. Latest Firefox and Chrome on Win7.
Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT
#63I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this in the thread but you can actually opt out of the xfinitiwifi thing. The deal is that you can use any of the hotspots if you have a comcast account and also share your router. If you opt out, you can no longer use the xfinitiwifi hotspots but nobody can use yours either.
Have you tried opting out? When my dad did, he ran into a mess of broken links and incorrect support pages. Eventually he got someone to opt him out over the phone... only to have the "xfinitywifi" network pop back up the next day. It took a few more tries to have it actually disabled once and for all. I imagine the less technically-inclined would have given up a lot earlier in the process.
Actually, that did happen to me and I ended up just forgetting about it. At the time I also wondered if it was intentional.
In fact I've noticed conveniently broken web pages from multiple large corporations. I've ran into this issue when attempting to access privacy policies and other disclosures.
There certainly may be something nefarious about this. Comcast could certainly get away with it.
Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT
#64Xfinity says your wireline speed will not be impeded by others who are using WiFi via the xfinitywifi shared service. Since DOCSIS 3.0 has no limit on the maximum number of channels (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Bandwidth_tables ), I believe in order to make that claim, they have to allocate additional channels to the xfinitywifi traffic. BUT OP will only double his bandwidth if he is purchasing a rate…
Every modem has a finite number of channels it can bond. Up and down are different. Also the CMTS (the device the cable modem connects to) limits the number of bonds per source modem.
A piece of coax has a finite amount of bandwidth it can carry. As modulation schemes get better (QAM256) you can do more with less.
To say DOCCIS 3 is limitless is not taking into consideration the hardware and frequency constraints. The more frequency you allocate to Internet the less is available for other programming (TV).
Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT
#65Another way for "bonding" would be to use mptcp ( http://multipath-tcp.org ). You might need to patch and build openwrt yourself for it... The key difference is with mptcp each individual tcp connection uses both connections at the same time, rather than picking a lottery.
I blogged about my setup at http://www.sajalkayan.com/post/fun-with-mptcp.html
Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT
#66Do xfinitywifi hotspots permanently authenticate clients based only on their MAC addresses? A malicious client could easily find the MAC address of any device connected to a xfinitywifi hotspot (by using e.g. airodump-ng [0]) and then spoof that device's MAC address on their own computer to access the internet via the hotspot without any authentication. [0] http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=airodump-ng
That's basically the only way to do it.
If it were really clever, it could ignore packets based on vendor extensions and device characteristics. They are not that easy to spoof (you would have to modify the driver, as opposed to just changing the MAC).
I actually use this method to use school WiFi anonymously (or rather, as someone else).
Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT
#67I use this very same feature of openwrt to load balance between my two ISPs. Here in argentina neither of the two ISP are reliable, but cheap enought if you really use then and you need reliability.
I recommend multiwan3 as the op suggest, other pkgs didnt work for me.
Some modern routers have two radios for 2.5 and 5ghz, but even with one radio openwrt allows you to set it up as client and ap.
I find other features of openwrt quite amazing like dnsmasq. It is a really powerful firmware.
Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT
#68So this works because you have neighbors who are also on Comcast and you can leach bandwidth from them?
The article is talking about also using the additional WiFi hotspot that every Comcast modem they provide you with has (not leaching from a neighbor). http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/comcast-sued-by-c...
But that hotspot goes through the same line that neighbors are connected with, no? Or Comcast doesn't count the hotspot traffic towards the plan bandwidth?
Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT
#69I also have XfinityWifi. The box that provides it is extremely buggy. I recommend setting it to "Bridge mode" (which turns it into a dumb modem) and then using OpenWRT in a normal, router configuration. You get a really good speed boost, especially over wifi, just by taking Xfinity's routing out of the equation.
Re: How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT
#70I'm surprised nobody has mentioned this in the thread but you can actually opt out of the xfinitiwifi thing. The deal is that you can use any of the hotspots if you have a comcast account and also share your router. If you opt out, you can no longer use the xfinitiwifi hotspots but nobody can use yours either.
I'm using my own modem, so no wifi hotspot in my home, but I've never been blocked from using another xfinity-wifi AP.