Cisco DPC3939B Xfinity Wifi

Hello Latitude42 and welcome,

Please use Manage your Business Private WiFi connection online to access your DPC wifi online.

Hope this helps you out.

Rather than starting a new thread I'll tag onto this one.

My modem was replaced this morning with a DPC3939B and I was told I would be able to de-activate the public Wifi but I'm now told by customer (phone) support that it is not possible. They have scheduled a technician visit for next Saturday to replace the modem with one that doesn't have the feature.

I do not have the "Manage Xfinity" option available on my account homepage so I can't do it from there, and the phone technician says it is impossible, period. Yet on this forum people seem to be able to do it.

I'm confused. I'd like to keep the modem but the extra hotspot is a nuisance. I have way too many wireless signals in this area and it is so bad my wireless remotes stop working due to all the congestion.

Is there a way for me to disable the public Wifi or not? If I can I will keep the modem but if I can't it's leaving next Saturday.

Thanks,

Haven't yet tried it, but the pinned 5-7-2015 message at the top of this forum says we can disable public hotspot wifi.  I'm going to try it this afternoon and see what happens.  Later. 

I think the Business dashboards may be different from what Comcast John had in front of him.  Try this: go to Manager Tools> Services> Internet.  My screen then shows "Manage XFINITY WiFi Hotspot," which I hit.  In the screen that comes up, there is no on/off or enable/disable button :(, but there is "Edit".  If you then hit "edit" it brings up a screen that does have an "on/off" switch for the Wifi hotspot.  When you hit "off", there is likely to be a message that says you need to reboot/power cycle the 3939B.  See if that works for you.

It didn't work here.  Though the manager screen says the WiFi hotspot is "off," it's still cranking along as usual.  

Rick

On my second phone call to Comcast, the agent had heard of the new portal feature and agreed with me that it was missing from my portal. He stated a level 2 ticket and it was fixed in a couple of days. It is true that you have to "Edit" if it is your intention to turn off the Xfinity Hotspot. But for the first 10 days or so I had absolutely nothing in the portal.

What I haven't done yet is go over to the physical location and see if it is really gone as desired (I am a church accidental techie and not there every day).

Sometime during the night my public Wifi did turn off. I tried power cycling the gateway to make sure it wouldn't come back on and it didn't. It would be nice if I could control both bands individually but this is sufficient. It would be even nicer if I could control it directly on the gateway but perhaps that is coming.

I'm still very disappointed with Comcast over this. It is disgraceful that they would not provide that functionality to their customers, especially their business customers. It is also careless of them to be installing these things everywhere. I see at least six Xfinity gateways with decent signal strength from my location. It's not surprising that I have so many issues with congestion on the 2.4 ghz band.I'm wondering if a complaint with the FCC is warranted.

For now I'm going to cancel the service call to have the modem removed.

Well this stinks! It turned itself back on again!

The website still says it's off and I tried power cycling the modem but it is still on. I tried turning it on and then off again via the website but it remains on. Did they wait until I cancelled the service call to remove the modem to turn it on again?  I'm not going to re-schedule for this weekend but will call and schedule the removal again Monday morning if this thing doesn't shut off and stay off.

I really think a FCC complaint is in order. They are installing these things everywhere and not giving the property owners control over them. These things are causing interference with my own equipment and FCC regulations requires that they be disabled if that is the case. 

Same here.  Maybe we need to "ping" Comcast_Jon to see if he has something to say.   (Is this a "placebo" "feature" that just lets Comcast ascertain how many users would turn the public wifi off if they could.  Just sayin'.)

Well, it's back off again. Hopefully it will stay that way unless I decide to turn it on.

Comcast may own the gateway but I own (well, rent) the location. If they wish to install a transmitter at my location they should provide me with the ability to de-activate it if I deem it is interferring with my own equipment. Most of the complaints I've seen on the Internet seem to relate to power usage, privacy issues and bandwidth usage. I seem to be the lone wolf complaining about interference.

I'm not sure how much interference these xfinitywifi transmitters are causing me. What I do know is that when I first installed wireless many years ago I was the first in the area to do so and my wireless speeds were great. They have been steadily deteriorating ever since as more and more people get wireless. In the evenings the 2.4Ghz band is almost useless to me now. It's OK for simple web browsing but any kind of HD video streaming is out. 5Ghz is still fine, very few of them around here. Unfortunately many of my devices still don't support 5Ghz.

I've actually discovered that I get the best performance at 2.4Ghz if I limit my router to "G" mode. It outperforms the "N" and "A" mode when activity is high.

I actually commend Comcast on what they are trying to do. Blanketing an area with accessable WiFi is a great idea. It's just that they are not considering the implications of what they are doing and what problems it can cause in heavily congested areas. Perhaps they could add some circuitry to the gateways to decide if an additional transmitter is neccessary in a given area. As I said in an earlier post, I see at least six xfinitywifi signals with good to excellent power from my location and many more lower power ones show up from time to time. That's getting a bit ridiculous.

The 5Ghz band is still clean. In fact I was the only one visible. Perhaps my neighbors don't have 5Ghz routers or perhaps it's just because 5Ghz doesn't travel very far through walls. That's why I wouldn't really mind leaving the 5Ghz public signal active. Right now it's an all or nothing situation and because of that I choose nothing.    

5Ghz does not travel through walls so leaving it active to provide public access is an exercise in futility.  If you put your gateway in the window - maybe.

If this deployment had been done properly then it would not have been a problem.  Being done properly means that the BWGs would be shipped with external antennas so that users could unscrew them if they did not want their BWG advertising to the world.  And if they did want that, then they could put on external antennas and place them properly.  Being done properly also means that any BWGs in an area would setup a WDS network.  This is how Ubiquity ap's operate.  Then there would only be 1 channel and 1 ssid and you could drive down the street and your phone could hop from AP to AP.  Or if there were a dozen BWGs in an apartment building then they would all cooperate.

My MIL is in a condo and it is so bad there that wifi only works if your within 15 feet of the transmitter, and I'm using a heavily optimized access point running DD-WRT firmware.

Ted