Recent hardware chonges street resulted in a VPN installed in home xfinity modem that runs full-time on all devices.

Hi.

Recently xfinity techs were in my neighborhood and the internet service was down for several hours starting at 8:30 am.  We were notified by xfinity a few days earlier that some unspecified work was to be done servicing the wires to our neighborhood residences.  No access inside our residence was asked for or needed.

So the day arrived, notification was provided, and the internet went down.

Upon returning home a few hours later, we found the internet was still down.  A simple restart of the modem fixed the issue and we had access to the internet.

I do check grc.com>grc|shields up from time to time and found that, after the work was done, I did not have the usual machine name connected to my IP address but instead had "Your Internet connection has no Reverse DNS" , which is usually a good thing.

No Reverse DNS is the result of using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) and used to obfuscate the real IP address assigned to the private home user by their internet network provider.  As in the example shown below, the users machine name is removed from public view from their IP address.  (I removed two complete octets of my IP address).

However, if one does not have a VPN program installed and in use on their system or device, one should be able to view the full machine name and IP address of their device on grc.com>grc|shields up.

I cannot.

My point?

xfinity is my internet network provider.  They appear to have installed a VPN program for our neighborhood, and all subscribers internet traffic has to go through their VPN first before it hits the World Wide Web.  If they use a personal VPN, their traffic still has to go through xfinity first.