Are people satisfied with their XB7 Gateway/modem

You would be better off buying your own hardware.  Despite all the marketing, the devices that any ISP provides are the cheapest ones available that will meet the bare minimum requirements for their category.  Despite the marketing, they are not very good; they are designed to work at the most basic level.  In addition, with their hardware, you will find that you have very little control over your network.  The devices are 'dummied down' so that you cannot change many basic functions that would give you better performance.

If you do buy your own, make sure the modem is on the device compatibility list. In addition, I would recommend buying separate Modem and router.  The router can be any brand you wish.  By going this route, you have the advantage of being able to upgrade the router in the future when new features, bands, and protocols are released. 

If you do buy your won hardware, you will have hardware that performs far above what xfinity provides, you will have complete control over you network, modem and router, and you will not have to deal with your hardware being locked down by the ISP. 

Thanks for the response NoN0BP!!  I hear ya and this is the way I used to do things in the past.  The XB3 was actually a pretty good device for us but the white brick seems to be complete controlled by Xfinity Apps etc.

I had changed my SSID and passwords in the XB3 and when working with Xfinity tech support (obviously a call center since the volume of noise in the background is ridiculous) they could not manage to bring the XB7 up reliably and my tel line did not come up as well. So I reactivated the XB3 and all is fine.  Finding someone to talk about access to admin the XB7 was hopeless as well.   Appreciate the input!! 

I'm another vote for the 3rd party gateway as well.  Controlling router settings with a phone app is just an insecure bad idea, and judging by the problems people have here, there's a problem with communication to a backend database to actually load settings and getting them to take effect.  This is not a 'value add'.

Might have been cheaper, and it's good for Xfinity private data gleaning, but it sure isn't as functional or secure as just logging in locally when you want to change something.  Also make sure you can set your own DNS servers.  I've never had much luck using Xfinity's and it's an easy fix if you can do it.

Seems like Xfinity is becoming out of touch with some of their "older" user base.  Having a brick with no lights on it immediately slows down debugging. Shutting down apps that reside on PC like devices in preference of tablet/phone based apps which I personally believe to be physically less secure at a minimum makes no sense. Having tech support that cannot understand accessing the 10.0.0.1 admin network and charging ridiculous prices for "additional connection cable TV boxes (8.99 a month for a device that probably costs 35.00 to mass produce at most) is helping to push people to streaming TV on other service provider networks.  Aw, [Edited: "Language"], I didn't want to rant :-)

Sorry  I just repacked my new XB7 in it's box for return.  Of the three individuals at Xfinity that I spoke with, none could provide a clear answer as to the benefit of switching over (except for the fact that the XB7 is faster, which would be fine if you want to increase your plan's cost for higher throughput).