Several years ago, Xfinity unilaterally decided to turn each home customer’s Xfinity router into a Wi-Fi Hot Spot. Many people were understandably less than excited to have their home router become an open Wi-Fi Hotspot, accessible to anyone even if Xfinity promised that no one could get into each user’s personal network.
On the other side of this, one problem that can arise is that your device (iPhone, iPad, Mac) can inadvertently join one of these insecure networks when what you really want is to join a secure network.
Because Apple gear will attempt to connect to open networks before closed ones, if a Xfinity Wi-Fi Hot Spot is nearby you might find yourself on that instead of the encrypted network you intended to join. You may not even realize you are connected to an unfamiliar network until you’ve already done a fair amount of work.
Thankfully, you can avoid this on a Mac by checking the network that you are connected to once you open your computer. If you’ve accidentally joined one of these networks, here’s what you do on a Mac:
Go to System Preferences > Network. Select Wi-Fi from the list on the left then click Advanced… (located in the lower right corner). Under the Wi-Fi tab, look at the list of Preferred Networks. Once you spot the Xfinity network, drag that network down to the bottom of the list.
This will instruct your Mac to connect to xFinity last and therefore hopefully connect to your preferred network first. Don’t delete the xFinity network, or else it will appear as the preferred network the next time you open up your device.