Here’s a story you might want to pass around. I recently upgraded from AT&T ADSL service (6mb down, 2Mb up) to Xfinity’s cable service (340Mb down, 12Mb up!) and they said they had a whiffy new router that they had just put into service that would make it much easier to work with.
Last year I helped a friend of mine out with a problem, that ended up being a replacement of Comcast’s router with an Arris router (don’t remember the model number). All her problems went away. When I retired 5 years ago, I had been working for a County IT department and had acquired, among other things, a Cisco CCNP certification, so I’m working well within my element here.
Imagine my surprise when Comcast delivers me this silly looking cylindrical thing with a slanted top – an XB6-A – that has only 2 gig-ethernet ports instead of the usual 4 and 2 voice ports, plus the expected coax port.
I plugged it in, turned it on, went through the configuration process, found a way around not having enough Ethernet ports, and was ready to fly. One of my applications requires a port forwarding entry. So imagine my surprise when I attempted to create a port forward on the router and it just gave me a link that said “You have to go to the xfinity.com website to create port forwarding entries”! Worse than that, when I got to their website, where the menu item was supposed to be for port forwarding, there was nothing!
Spent an hour and a half on the phone with Xfinity tech support, and they finally begrudgingly allowed that it must be a bug, they couldn’t fix it, and they’d get back to me. So I immediately ordered an Arris SVG2482AC router from Amazon. It has the usual 4 gig-Ethernet ports, along with 2 voice and a coax port, AND a space for a battery backup. They decided it wasn’t an “essential item” in these days of Coronavirus, so even though I’m a Prime customer, it was three weeks before it was shipped.
Fired up the new router. Connected to it. Started to create a Port forward, then thought that maybe I’d better create an IP reservation for my PC first, then create the forward, just to be sure. While I was doing that, Xfinity/Comcast finally recognized the new router and offered to restore my backed-up configuration, so I joyfully said Sure! And continued on my way.
Five minutes later I was absolutely horrified when I went back to where the Port Forwarding section of the router had been and was confronted with that same nasty notice that I had to go to Xfinity.com to manage Port Forwarding! It had been local a minute ago, but somehow they managed to hijack it again, even on my personal router! Even worse, when I got to the xfinity website, I got a nastygram telling me that I couldn’t do that, I would have to upgrade my equipment! Presumably to one of their own routers!
So shorten an already long story, the solution was I had to reset the new router to factory settings. Then I couldn’t connect to it via DHCP, so I had to hard-code an IP address on my PC. Then I created a port Forward (which was back to its normal local configuration status). THEN I reconnected to Xfinity (which also took an act of Congress).
Mysteriously, once all was said and done, the port forwarding function remained local once something had already been configured to forward, which was an added blessing – I had just been hoping that if it was hijacked again, I’d be able to view it on xfinity.com.
But that practice of hijacking what should be a local router function is absolutely unforgivable! If you have any pull with Xfinity, you might at least put a serious bug in their ear about it!
Rich Gierman
