A Reddit forum on the issue includes one common complaint: Many are having trouble successfully turning the “feature” off. If you are affected, you can switch off the public Wi-Fi service by accessing the gateway’s settings or calling Comcast directly. We provide information to our customers about the service and how they can easily turn off the public Wi-Fi hotspot if they wish.“ From a Reddit thread. But Comcast calls this “minimal” and that it designed the system “to support robust usage.”Ĭomcast also offered a general response to the lawsuit today, saying, “we disagree with the allegations in this lawsuit and believe our Xfinity Wi-Fi home hotspot program provides real benefits to our customers. The company acknowledges that, as the suit contends, neighborhoods with many routers broadcasting many signals can result in interference and impact the speed of connections. But Comcast has not become one of the more disliked companies in the country by always playing nice.”Ĭomcast has defended the hotspots, explaining that they consume minimal extra power and do not pose security risks because they are walled off as a separate IP address. In the last three years, there were 31,980 complaints lodged against Comcast with the Better Business Bureau, compared to just 22,332 against AT&T–a company with three times as many customers.Īs Daniel Kline wrote for the Motley Fool: “Very few companies are brazen enough to sell customers a service then piggyback its own product on top of it. Of the 200 or so companies rated in this year’s American Customer Satisfaction Index, only United Airlines and Time Warner Cable drew lower ratings for their services than Comcast did. “Based on our tests,” the company stated on its website, “we expect that by the time they roll it out to all of their subscribers, Comcast will be pushing tens of millions of dollars per month of the electricity bills needed to run their nationwide public Wi-Fi network onto consumers.” Comcast asked the company to re-do the tests on a newer version of the router and the results, Speedify said, were even worse.Ĭomcast, which has brought in $8.4 billion in revenue from high-speed internet so far this year, has recently sought to burnish its reputation with a raft of customer service improvements. But depending on your situation, one might be a better option than the other.Around the time of Comcast’s initial announcement, Speedify, a company that analyzes Internet connections, tested Comcast’s equipment to determine its electricity consumption compared to standard equipment. Similarly, a friend bought a NETGEAR Orbi mesh Wi-Fi system to make sure the Wi-Fi signal was strong throughout his two-story house.īoth Wi-Fi extenders and mesh Wi-Fi systems are an excellent way to extend the reach of your Wi-Fi. Like magic, I could finally stream Netflix without the buffering icon crashing the party. When I visited my parents, I was so frustrated by the weak Wi-Fi signal in the guest bedroom that I bought them a TP-Link N300 Wi-Fi extender. Sometimes you need an extra piece of equipment to pull that Wi-Fi signal to the farthest corners of your house.