Monday, December 30, 2013

Disabling Wi-Fi on a Comcast Xfinity Cable Modem

Judging by traffic and comments, my last technical "how-to" post was a moderate success, and was found by folks Googling for the solution—so I'm back with another quickie.

A few months ago Comcast sent me an Arris TG862G cable modem, an upgrade from the previous Motorola device to enable higher speed internet access. On the upside it did the job more than handsomely:

On the downside it insisted on being a firewall, DHCP server, and Wi-Fi access point—when I already have something I'm perfectly happy with for those functions. And while some aspects could be tweaked via the admin console, the Wi-Fi couldn't be disabled.

I wanted it disabled.

So if, like me, you want to disable Wi-Fi on your Xfinity Arris TG862G cable modem (how about that for SEO), here's what you need to know: just call Comcast and ask them to put your device into "bridge mode". I did, it was painless, it took them a minute or two, and the box became exactly what I wanted: a transparent bridge between co-ax cable and my Asus router. The N16 now has a the public IP and does its job as firewall, Wi-Fi access point, ssh tunnel endpoint, DHCP server, and so on.

Enjoy.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I'm unable to use my android table since comcast has added xfinity and
Home-66F2. What do I need to do to use this wifi? It wont let me use the router that we have on it.

Unknown said...

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AnotherView said...

This doesn't work for me. I want to use the modem as a router, though I have other routers. I only want to turn off wifi. What it looks like is that Comcast has hijacked the modem and removed the option to turn off wifi. I own my modem btw.

Unknown said...

i simply logged in to the comcast web page, went to the support chat, asked them to turn off my wifi, and set modem to bridge mode. 10 mim. later, done. happy customer.

AnotherView said...

As I said, bridge mode is useless if you want to use the router in the modem. However, Comcast told me that they do not permit user ownership of the model of modem I bought. So, I had to order another modem at about the same price but without a router. Then I had to buy a router, which naturally doesn't work with the modem. I found it very strange that they did not permit me to own the same modem that they rent to customers and that the interface for that modem does not allow me, as the owner and user, to turn off one of its features. Frankly, I see that as scandalous. And now I am forced to try to replicate the functionality of the modem I had with a separate modem and router, which is inherently less reliable.