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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2563 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: March 22, 2017

The phones work if they are not connected to Wifi.

If they are connected to Wifi, all bets are off.

Telling the phones to never connect to xfinitywifi is not a long-term solution as the major benefit of Fi is wifi calling and 80-90% of the wifi hotspots you find, particularly at my wife's clients' houses, are xfinitywifi.

Further, it all worked in February.





goobster  ·  2563 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Hey, my T-Mobile iPhone works great on both wireless and cellular networks!

Ducks and runs away...

kleinbl00  ·  2563 days ago  ·  link  ·  

How's it work out in Monroe? Say, if you're driving to Jay's house?

'cuz both me and the wifey had T-Mobile iPhones and the TMO signal goes to nothing. Sprint? Sprint works out there but it doesn't work in lots of other places. Meanwhile we've literally got a 50' ATT tower in the parking lot but people on Verizon bitch that there's no service. So duck and run away all you want, but understand that we had to bail on that exact configuration because the minute you cross the slough you are radio silent and that's no good when you deliver babies for a living.

kleinbl00  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
goobster  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Well... that's Monroe, man. Might as well be the Moon!

(Honestly, I turn off my phone when I go to Jay's, because the battery will die as it panics and continually, fruitlessly, hopelessly scans for signal... and receives none.)

But then, I'm a writer. I don't run a birth center. So powering off my phone is a perfectly reasonable thing to do. For days at a time.

kleinbl00  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Right. If you did deliver babies for a living, you'd discover that home birth mothers have a startling proclivity for living on the moon. More than that for my wife to accompany me out there she has to call everyone who might possibly go into labor over the next however-many hours and give them an alternate contact person (another midwife) to call with questions or concerns. And then as soon as we're back in cell coverage my wife has to check all her voicemails (usually under a dozen) and check in with that alternate midwife.

cgod  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Go to settings and see if you have an option called something like "Sprint Wifi Optimizer". Turn it off if you do, it automatically tries to connect to Sprint partners like Xfinity.

Just a suggestion.

If you have an Xfinity account you can delete your device in your account setting but this might cause more problems than it fixes if she needs to do it every time she uses Xfinity wifi.

Might be Google's fault but it might be other shit messing with Google.

kleinbl00  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Google phones don't have any of that shit.

cgod  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I've had coustomers who's devices frequently leap into Xfinity wifi instead of the shop wifi. I guess it's a thing. Maybe Xfinity forces it somehow? They'd like all your data.

It's only been 1 out if 100 people it seems to happen to. Have you tried a different brand of phone yet?

kleinbl00  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It's a known problem.

    You go into a bar. Standing in the doorway, you say, loudly, "Hey, Mike!" 22 people named "Mike" turn around and stare at you for more information. You, lacking Mike Murphy's last name, say, "Hey, Mike!", again to 22 angry Mikes who all try to answer you at the same time in a mass confusion as they are all Mike. Everyone is lost as you can't talk to 22 people simultaneously. That's what Comcast has done to crash wifi across America. Every Comcast wifi hotspot has the SAME EXACT SSID, "xfinitywifi".

    So, your stupid Windows/IOS/Android/Apple computer calls to connect to "xfinitywifi". At my local Waffle House, 15 of them all answer my call SIMULTANEOUSLY and, usually, nothing even connects. If one does connect, in the off chance one is a little stronger than the rest, the first time you send data to it, they all start calling and calling trying to reconnect. We sit with a professional networking program and joke about how stupid this is from this giant communications company that should, but doesn't, know better. Unless you can get close enough to ONE xfinitywifi that obliterates the signals from all the other xfinitywifi stations on the channel (1 or 6, sometimes 11), it WON'T WORK! As usual, when trying to describe this to tech support who know how to configure cable boxes but have no idea how 802.11(x) wifi operates, trying to get the Comcast beast to CHANGE the SSIDs to something UNIQUE, such as "xfinitywifi + the last 4 hex characters of that modem's MAC address" is like trying to push a 2500 pound elephant up a hill. Every hotspot having the same SSID must be ok or the Comcast beast wouldn't have done it. So, expect wireless wifi in every Comcast city in America to become a nightmare of stations all with the same SSID crashing and crashing and trashing wifi for everyone, not just Comcast's inop customers unless FCC does its job.

Starbuck's can pull it off because although they're everywhere, there generally aren't more than three per block. On the other hand, the birth center backs up against a 22-unit apartment building and unless you buy your own modem, every single Comcast customer is bleeding out "xfinitywifi" giving your phone around 11 SSIDs with the same name.

I can watch the "xfinitywifi" signal jump 20dB as my phone chooses between three or four of them.

Project Fi only works with Google or Nexus-branded phones because only Google or Nexus-branded phones will run dual-band on a single SIM. Your choices are 5X, 6, 6P, Pixel or Pixel XL.

Also, if your router is running damn near any kind of security, it'll take an extra second or two over barely-secure xfinitywifi. My laptop does it often, even though I'm less than five feet away from a rock-solid Netgear Nighthawk. It's the security.

veen  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Then how does eduroam solve this problem? I have solid wifi on all campuses in the world and throughout all campus buildings with no issues like this, through one single 'eduroam' SSID.

kleinbl00  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Ever set up an Airport Express? Simple as fuck, right?

How bout setting up an Airport Express to extend an existing network? utter shitshow, right? I'm not even sure they let you do it anymore. Take it from me - it takes about five hours of experimentation the first time, then pretty much every time you change something, expect to spend another couple hours.

Wanna see how Eduroam does it? It's on the Wikipedia page:

    The eduroam service uses IEEE 802.1X as the authentication method and a hierarchal system of RADIUS servers.[15] The hierarchy consists of RADIUS servers at the participating institutions, national RADIUS servers run by the National Roaming Operators and regional top-level RADIUS servers for individual world regions. When a user A from institution B in country C with two-letter country-code top-level domain xy visits institution P in country Q, A's mobile device presents his credentials to the RADIUS server of institution P. That RADIUS server discovers that it is not responsible for the Institution_B.xy realm and proxies the access request to the national RADIUS server of country Q. If C and Q are different countries, it is in turn proxied to the regional top-level RADIUS server, and then to the national RADIUS server of country C, which has a complete list of the participating eduroam institutions in that country. That national server forwards the credentials to the home institution B, where they are verified. The 'acknowledge' travels back over the proxy-hierarchy to the visited institution P and the user is granted access.

You can build a mesh network with Ubiquiti or Ruckus or whatever. You pay more. a Unifi is like $90 a node, compared to the $25 you pay for consumer shit. But it allows you to have everything working in concert - adjust the power, hand signals off from WAP to WAP and most importantly, put credentialing and access at one centralized location.

On the other hand, when you open up your Comcast router it has a 2nd network built in, on the same frequencies, at the same power, as your own personal SSID. The only thing Comcast has control over is whether or not your credentials let you on.

It matters a lot less when things are well-spaced but when they aren't, look out.

raisin  ·  2562 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Yeah, I'm curious about this as well, currently on eduroam wi-fi with no problems.

dublinben  ·  2563 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It sounds like a better, albeit more expensive, solution for you would be good old Google Voice and multiple cell phones. You can have a single GV phone number ring through to your phones, and if you're on both AT&T and Verizon, you'll have service anywhere there's running water and electricity.

kleinbl00  ·  2563 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Once more, with feeling:

    1) Things started going pear-shaped after the March 7 update.

After yet another hour of troubleshooting, the latest version my phone now sees is Feb 27 and it appears to be working as advertised. The Play store still shows March 7 as the latest build but they've locked my phone off from grabbing it and lo and behold, we're back to where we were when things worked.

I honestly don't understand how this became a discussion about how I don't know how to phone. It's frustrating verging on insulting.

For the record? I have a 16-instance SIP gateway on 90-minute battery backup with a (not-yet-configured) failover from Comcast to Frontier that records voicemails and sends them as .wav files over email to hit my wife's phone on T-Mobile, Sprint, US Cellular or Wifi all because in Washington paging networks use the same frequencies and towers as cell networks which means they provide no redunancy which means I effectively needed to roll my own 5 nines reliability paging network out of off-the shelf componentry and fuckin'A, up until Google rolled an update (an update I've now spent five hours, six emails and fifteen bug reports unfucking) it all worked gangbusters without having to pay for two f'n plans. AT&T? GSM. Verizon? CDMA. TMO? GSM (and they share most of AT&T's towers). Sprint? CDMA (and they share many of Verizon's towers).

So sorry if this comes off as snippy but I legit assembled a goddamn 7-phone PBX in my apartment in LA to confirm all this shit worked and the problem isn't that the solution doesn't work, it's that google fucked up.

dublinben  ·  2563 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I never meant to imply that you didn't know what you were doing. I think it's ridiculous that Google can't get their shit to work. I think there's a reason why consumers are so hesitant to adopt real Google products (Nexus devices, Fiber, Fi, etc.) and your ordeal is a perfect example.

kleinbl00  ·  2563 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Thanks. Google is trying to say "we fixed your problem all done!" and it's getting on my last nerve, especially as my "tech lead" is taking off until Monday.