Wifi Hotspots - No Internet after connecting to Hotspots - Iphone 8

Hello,

Thanks for posting to the forum. Per the Xfinity hotspots, there is no restriction per account to the number of devices that can connect to a hotspot. Make sure your iPhone is on the latest version of the iOS which is 13.3.1. Also, I’ll have you remove your Xfinity Wifi profile from your iPhone 8 first and foremost. The profile itself is what creates the authentication. Please go in to;

Settings>General>Profile>then remove your Xfinity Profile.

After that, un-install the Xfinity Wifi Hotspot app. When you download the app again and sign in, that will prompt the app to re-create a profile for your device. Let me know what result you get.

Sincerely,
Chris

I'm not having this same issue, but after reading your suggestion, i noticed that Settings>General>Profile no longer is on my phone after updating to the latest iOS version.  Any idea why this would be?

Hi araknon,

Unsure as to why that is. What kind of iPhone do you have? I gathered the information from my previous post from an iPhone X.

Chris

good question...   It could be an IOS upgrade bug.   Software upgrade code is especially impossible to write perfectly for all the possibilities.   

Did you find a way to try reinstalling the profile, and did it help? 

Definitely there are other threads with people reporting similar problems, but few enough that it seems like it must be a 'corner-case bug' hitting a small percentage of phones.  

Please let us know how it goes and what you think and any other details or oddities you observe.

Hi Chris,

Hope you're still there.  I see this is an old thread.

I have a similar issue but can offer more detail.  I had this problem solved four years ago but it has started again.  I work in public safety, and in off-times of the year, when I have downtime, I access the public wifi hotspots at certain public parks in my area.  If there's a lot of downtime I might be on there for extended periods.  I use an iPad Air 2 and an iPhone X for access.  About four years ago I noticed that the iPad could no longer log on to one of my regular hotspots in a public park.  Then there were two hotspots it couldn't access.  Then three.  Then it couldn't log on to any of them.  So I substituted the iPhone, which worked for awhile, then started to do the same thing.  Then I brought in a notebook computer, which worked for awhile, then it too started to do the same thing.  At that point, all my devices were refused access - when they connected to the xfinitywifi or CableWiFi SSID's, I'd see an endlessly spinning wait cursor and "no Internet connection" displayed in the wifi window.  Resetting Internet settings, forgetting the network, removing and reinstalling the secure profile, uninstalling and reinstalling the HotSpots app - none of that made any difference.  The problem was escalated to Tier 3 and I shared my suspicion with the Tier 3 rep that the system might maintain a list of MAC addresses that make too-frequent access, and are marked for exclusion.  As a worker who is in those areas as part of my job (and who pays $300/month for my service), in an area that is essentially closed for the season and empty of other subscribers, excluding me seemed wrong.  The Tier 3 rep agreed.  It took a few weeks of internal wrangling but someone threw the proverbial magic switch and all my devices suddenly started working again.  And they've worked until recently, when the same thing started happening again.  This time around I'm having a very difficult time finding someone who can solve the problem, or steer me to someone who can.  Can you?

The important question is whether ANY devices can connect.  If not, then the hotspot itself may have failed (it does happen) or its network connection may have failed.  In the scenario I posted above, when my first device got blocked, the others could still connect.  After all of them had been blocked one at a time, friends' and colleagues' devices could still connect.  When THAT happens, you have to start looking for what is different about the blocked devices.

Conventional wisdom for a device having trouble like this is to have the device "forget" the network, then try to reconnect.  Failing that, if it's an IOS device, uninstall the Hotspots app, go to settings/general/profile and remove the Xfinity profile if it exists, and go to general/reset and reset network settings (careful to do ONLY that as you can erase your entire device from the general/reset page).  Then try to connect again.  If you have an alternative means of accessing the Internet, you can also reinstall the Hotspots app from the App Store, run it while still connected to the Internet and re-enter your Xfinity credentials, then download and reinstall the Xfinity profile by going to https://prov.wifi.xfinity.com/ (do these things after successfully connecting to the hotspot otherwise).

For many people, the above steps will restore access.  For me, they didn't restore access to my devices while others could still connect, giving rise to the suspicion that my devices appear on a MAC address exclusion list.

I've been basically having this issue since before I moved to Xfinity Mobile last October and thankfully I've never been in such a bad reception area that I absolutely needed to connect to Xfinity Wifi for data. I usually just turn off WiFi when I ride the subway because I'll just completely lose data whenever my phone connects to an Xfinity hotspot in the station that's completely useless to me.

I'm wondering if my frequent movement from hotspot to hotspot as I move around the city is also triggering this MAC address exclusion. It's never worked since I got a new iPhone 11 directly from Comcast when I switched... I ended up downloading the Hotspot app and it says the Secure Profile is up-to-date. I have no option on the latest version of the OS to delete any configuration profiles for troubleshooting. (I believe this is an option that isn't visible in the Settings app if you don't have any mobile device management or configuration profiles installed.)

I'm gonna call today, but I'm not hopeful with the luck you folks have had with phone support. I'll post again if I've had any luck.