U

Visitor

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4 Messages

Tuesday, May 27th, 2025 9:10 PM

How much data is redownloaded to my modem after an outage?

How much data is redownloaded to my modem and cable boxes after an outage? Does that data count against my quota?

Official Employee

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946 Messages

5 days ago

Good afternoon @user_ajs. Can you elaborate some more on your question? 

Visitor

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4 Messages

Yes, I'm happy to elaborate:

1. I'm sitting at home watching cable TV, surfing the Web, or working from home connected to internet.

2. My Xfinity service goes down. (5 times (so far) this month, but that's not important right now.)

3. Some time later, my Xfinity service comes back up.

My questions are:

- When service comes back up, does data need to be redownloaded from Xfinity to my modem and cable boxes to bring them back up, as when they are rebooted?

- If so, how much data is downloaded?

- And does the download of that data count against my internet data quota?

Official Employee

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2.2K Messages

 

user_ajs Thank you for the additional information! We have a great article that outlines Questions and answers about our Data Usage Plan.  

 

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Visitor

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4 Messages

Yes, I have read that document, have you? Which of those FAQs answers my questions? None. That's why I posted the questions here, to a (supposed) human. I will assume that none of the Xfinity staff know the answer or are permitted to find and share the answer. I will further assume that the data downloaded after each outage is in the range of 10GB and my 5 outages this month cost 50GB against my data quota, and that will also be the cause of the overage charge that Xfinity will impose this month. Nice business model.

Official Employee

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2.2K Messages

 

user_ajs The Customer Security Assurance Team can help research data usage concerns on your account. 

 

I am an Official Xfinity Employee.
Official Employees are from multiple teams within Xfinity: CARE, Product, Leadership.
We ask that you post publicly so people with similar questions may benefit from the conversation.
Was your question answered? Please, mark a reply as the Accepted Answer.tick

Gold Problem Solver

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26.4K Messages

2 days ago

How much data is redownloaded to my modem and cable boxes after an outage? Does that data count against my quota?

Very little. Only enough to re-validate and reinitialize the devices. I would guess a few megabytes at most. Since data usage is counted by the gigabyte (1,000 megabytes), the startup data, if it is counted, is a rounding error as far as usage is concerned. 

Please be aware that there are 2 kinds of responses in this Forum: Replies and Comments. When you Comment on a post by scrolling down to "Comment on this post here...", I am notified of your response. But if you select Reply, I am NOT notified and may not be aware of your response.

Problem Solver

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593 Messages

2 days ago

When your service goes down and then comes back up, there is a brief period of communications between your gateway and the node it is assigned to.  This is commonly referred to as a 'handshake'.  The controller queries your gateway, and your gateway provides the necessary information to establish a secure connection.  All of this does not generate a large amount of data, certainly not enough to have a major impact on how much data you have used.  Your gateway reboots on a regular basis, even if the internet does not go down. You will see it in the admin portal under "lease time", one for IPV4 and one for IPV6.  Even if the network goes down, and your gateway needs to install a firmware update when it comes back up, it won't eat up much data.

Visitor

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4 Messages

2 days ago

Thank you all for the clear explanation.

Official Employee

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2.2K Messages

Of course, let us know if you have any other concerns we can help with! 

I am an Official Xfinity Employee.
Official Employees are from multiple teams within Xfinity: CARE, Product, Leadership.
We ask that you post publicly so people with similar questions may benefit from the conversation.
Was your question answered? Please, mark a reply as the Accepted Answer.tick
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