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How I doubled my Internet speed with OpenWRT
- late2part 12y agoAwesome hack!
- moron4hire 12y agoSo this works because you have neighbors who are also on Comcast and you can leach bandwidth from them?
- antsar 12y agoIn my area, there are wireless access points mounted on some telephone poles which provide WiFi hotspots for anyone with credentials from a major local ISP. Apart from that, my understanding is that Comcast routers broadcast your network and also broadcast this comcast hotspot network, and they are metered (and presumably capped) independently. So with this hack you would use only your equipment, you're just taking advantage of both networks that are being broadcast by your router.
- matt_kantor 12y ago> So with this hack you would use only your equipment, you're just taking advantage of both networks that are being broadcast by your router. Check the article again. The author is connecting his router to his neighbor's hotspot.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- ghouse 12y agoIt works because he has access to two separate networks and can load balance between the two. His neighbors could be using any ISP. So long as his router can also connect to their network, he can load balance between their wireless network and his wired network. If his router had three radios, he could load balance between to upstream wireless networks and his own downstream network.
- moron4hire 12y agoMy point was, in this setup, if his neighbor was not a Comcast customer, then he would not have any legitimate authorization to connect to the xfinitywifi network through his neighbor's router. I don't have a lot of confidence in Comcast to have set it up so that connections to the xfinitywifi network do not impact the regular, private usage. It's just not in that company's style to think proactively and conscientiously about its customers.
- chwahoo 12y agoIt may be that connections though xfinitywifi don't count against the neighbors allocated bandwidth and won't degrade their service since their router and connection support more than their allocated bandwidth. Can anyone confirm if this is the case?
- grok2 12y agoThe article is talking about also using the additional WiFi hotspot that every Comcast modem they provide you with has (not leaching from a neighbor). http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/comcast-sued-by-customers-for-turning-routers-into-public-hotspots/ http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/comcast-sued-by-c...
- shmerl 12y agoBut that hotspot goes through the same line that neighbors are connected with, no? Or Comcast doesn't count the hotspot traffic towards the plan bandwidth?
- FireBeyond 12y agoIt counts it towards your data cap (if you are subject to it), but not to the bandwidth available under your plan.
- moron4hire 12y agoThat's the worst. I have more than enough bandwidth for Netflix, but I frequently hot my data cap. I don't think there is such a thing as a comcast account without a data cap.
- FireBeyond 12y agoI pay for a business account (but I work from home). No caps, no torrent or other throttling, no port blocking (back in the days when I ran my own mail server), optional static IPs. But you definitely pay for it.
- moron4hire 12y agoI might gave to go that route. Thanks for reminding me.
- tacon 12y ago
- bithive123 12y agoI believe this only increases apparent bandwidth for applications which may open multiple connections at the same time, like web browsing and BitTorrent.
- enraged_camel 12y agoSo it requires access to a second wireless network, as well as a router that supports OpenWRT and has two radios. I don't see anything particularly noteworthy here. He just happens to have a very specific setup and is leveraging it.
- ssully 12y agoI think it's noteworthy only because of how wide spread Comcast's newer router's are becoming, specifically in dense areas in the United States. It's a technique that obviously isn't ground breaking or that technical, but it's actually viable because of these new routers Comcast is renting out as their standard router now. I live in a typical neighborhood in Chicago; houses are spaced apart enough to where you don't get a ton of wifi overlap, but enough to see a handful of your neighbors networks. I noticed the first "XfinityWifi" network about mid/late last year and now will see between 2 - 3 from my house. I found this post interesting because of how he is leveraging these, relatively, open connections.
- icebraining 12y agoUsing a router's second radio as a client is probably novel and unexpected to most HN readers.
- josh2600 12y agoThis is all well and good until you start doing anything with address sensitive replies. For example a VoIP call would need some way of anchoring the packets to a specific connection for the duration of the call (some kind of session pinning would be ideal). I like the idea but I wonder how it performs on many use cases (like Skype or online gaming).
- tres 12y agorouting should be 'sticky' to an ip address; connections to any given ip address should use the same outbound route for the duration of that connection. from http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/mwan3 http://wiki.openwrt.org/doc/howto/mwan3 Linux outgoing network traffic load-balancing is performed on a per-IP connection basis – it is not channel-bonding, where a single connection (e.g. a single download) will use multiple WAN connections simultaneously
- josh2600 12y agoAhh cool! That's way better. I thought it was just channel bonding. I can still easily imagine a conflict where your signaling IP and your media IP are different in VoIP, but binding connections to IP addresses is pretty reasonable.
- nrahnemoon1 12y agoVery cool. In practice, unless you live next to a coffee shop, there'd almost never be anyone connected to your xfinity wifi network, so you'd get the full bandwidth anyhow. Although, if your neighbor has xfinity wifi, it'd be a smart way to leach off your neighbor's bandwidth. Also, because your router is a routed client of the xfinity wifi network, I'd imagine there'd be a big increase in latency. It'd be interesting to see the before/after speed test results.
- cbabraham 12y agoI think you can connect to your neighbors xfinity hotspot without using up any of their private bandwidth allocation. The hotspot connection gets its own.
- nrahnemoon1 12y agoThat's what they want you to think. ;)
- sliverstorm 12y agoIt sounds like a creative way to get around bandwidth allocations. My service is 3Mbps. My modem & my hardline are both capable of much more, but I only pay for 3Mbps so I only get 3Mbps. I think this trick is basically allowing the author to tap into the unallocated extra modem & line capacity that is currently used to feed xfinitywifi.
- mwsherman 12y agoI don't see any benchmarks, did I miss them? I suspect this doesn't double bandwidth, the packets all end up over the same neighborhood network. The only way it would increase bandwidth is if it evades artificial throttles. Having two connections to the same (neighborhood) pipe seems useless.
- Dylan16807 12y agoThere are ISPs that don't throttle your access to the neighborhood pipe? It doesn't have to be artificial, either. Just using better tech for the pipe that has to carry multiple users.
- mst 12y agoPossibility one: you end up with two "shares" of that pipe, FSVO "share", which may help depending on how contended it is. Possibility two: placebo effect.
- ricardobeat 12y agoUPC has a similar system, where the guest network has extra bandwidth, on top of your own subscription. Even if Comcast doesn't do this, he is leeching off his neighbour's connection and not his own.
- davej 12y agoWas interested in this so I did a bit of investigation into whether it makes sense with UPC. UPC only makes a small amount of bandwidth available on the 'Wi Free' (UPC's version of Xfinity) network, seems to be about 2.5mbps down and 0.5mbps up. In my country (Ireland), the minimum package you need to get 'Wi-Free' is 120mbps down, so It's not really worth the effort for an extra 1% bandwidth.
- ars 12y ago> The only way it would increase bandwidth is if it evades artificial throttles. Well obviously. They give you a specific bandwidth for your house, you can buy more or less bandwidth if you want. > Having two connections to the same (neighborhood) pipe seems useless. The neighborhood pipe can probably do 100 to 1000 times the bandwidth to each individual house. So how is that useless? Plus with xfinitywifi they allocate double bandwidth to the house, so the wifi bandwidth doesn't slow down the purchased bandwidth. (The cable modem can easily handle 10 times the bandwidth typically allocated to it.)
- 0x0 12y agoDoesn't the xfinitiwifi inject ads MITM-style? I recall seeing some weird html overlays with xfinity ads on random web pages last time I browsed over one of these SSIDs.
- rwg 12y agoI don't know if they inject ads, but they have the capability to do it. When I connect to an "xfinitywifi" SSID, the first HTTP page load I do will have a little "You're using XFINITY Wi-Fi. Isn't it totally awesomesauce?!"-style pop-up appear for a few seconds in the lower right corner of the browser window.
- malchow 12y agoYes, I have seen this too. They put a modal over an HTML document with a Comcast-sold IAB ad.
- ars 12y ago> Doesn't the xfinitiwifi inject ads MITM-style? No. I feel like this post should be longer, but I can't think else to say. The answer to your question is: No.
- hueving 12y agoWell your post seems to be at odds with sibling comments. What is your source of information?
- 0x0 12y agoWell I definitively saw unnatural HTML content overlays in the browser, and the only explanation I can think of is that the wifi hotspot MITM-injected javascript either in .html or .js files as they were downloaded to insert these overlays. Would love to see this proved wrong though :)
- gtwy 12y agoYes it does, I've used it and it 100% does.
- nmc 12y ago
- ausjke 12y agoused openwrt for 8 years but never used this feature, looks cool. as a matter of fact I'm updating my home-router with newest openwrt head right now
- windexh8er 12y agoWhat the author doesn't realize is he's doubled nothing. DOCCIS networks are shared mediums. That means you have to double bandwidth by increasing the number of channels you have. Newer DOCCIS modema are already bonding channels today. Most commonly 4 channel bond on the downstream and 2 on the up. By connecting to the cable modem twice, via two different routes, does nothing to change the available bandwidth available to the users behind the CPE (cable modem). As some have stated you could do this against your neighbors modem to share more channels on the cable media, however your neighbor is on the same HFC node and sharing the same available bandwidth to how many other users are connected to that node. You may get a few extra megabit but its the latency that will make that portion of the link "slower" so you really won't improve things much, if at all. The best way to improve consumer Internet connection is to get a fast router that can route fast in hardware. I'm always amazed people think a SOHO device doing WiFi, NAT, DHCP, DNS, etc. on gimped hardware is "fast". The majority of time it's not and real improvements can be realized with dedicates hardware. Meaning that until you split service off from routing using cheap, consumer SOHO gear, will most always be the bottleneck.
- pat2man 12y agoHis connection is probably throttled. This essentially doubles his throttled bandwidth.
- windexh8er 12y agoHaving worked with deployment of these networks (DOCCIS 3) for a Comcast subsidiary I can tell you this is not true. If you have 10Mb the non-guest network is prioritized. But you cannot use more than 10Mbit between the two. As stated, the author has doubled nothing.
- icebraining 12y agoYou can if you use the neighbor's guest connection.
- 12y ago
- m0skit0 12y agoAm I the only one that sees missing letters? http://s2.postimg.org/vpba0a1wp/image.png http://s2.postimg.org/vpba0a1wp/image.png
- ipsin 12y agoI'm seeing the same thing in Firefox/Win7. In Chrome, all the content is missing, except for the fixed-width text.
- MrRadar 12y agoI'm seeing corrupted 'r's in the section headings. http://i.imgur.com/v7HZcQI.png http://i.imgur.com/v7HZcQI.png (Firefox 36, Win 7 x64, AMD Radeon HD 7770)
- skylan_q 12y agoI've got the same problem with my Radeon 6950
- Havoc 12y agoSame. Win 8 64/ Chrome / nvidia 860
- hayksaakian 12y agoi assumed that was intentional, but now that i think about it you're probably right.
- theandrewbailey 12y agoI'm not missing letters, but lowercase Rs look like knives. Latest Firefox and Chrome on Win7. http://postimg.org/image/7zcz4oh25/ http://postimg.org/image/7zcz4oh25/
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- itsjareds 12y agoFor what it's worth, everything looks fine for me on Mac OS using Chromium 42.0.2308.0, Firefox 36.0.4, and Safari 8.0.5 (10600.5.15).
- chatmasta 12y agoI'm surprised nobody has mentioned this in the thread but you can actually opt out of the xfinitiwifi thing. The deal is that you can use any of the hotspots if you have a comcast account and also share your router. If you opt out, you can no longer use the xfinitiwifi hotspots but nobody can use yours either.
- mintplant 12y agoHave you tried opting out? When my dad did, he ran into a mess of broken links and incorrect support pages. Eventually he got someone to opt him out over the phone... only to have the "xfinitywifi" network pop back up the next day. It took a few more tries to have it actually disabled once and for all. I imagine the less technically-inclined would have given up a lot earlier in the process.
- chatmasta 12y agoActually, that did happen to me and I ended up just forgetting about it. At the time I also wondered if it was intentional. In fact I've noticed conveniently broken web pages from multiple large corporations. I've ran into this issue when attempting to access privacy policies and other disclosures. There certainly may be something nefarious about this. Comcast could certainly get away with it.
- joezydeco 12y agoI'm using my own modem, so no wifi hotspot in my home, but I've never been blocked from using another xfinity-wifi AP.
- pseudonym 12y agoIf they have that much trouble taking the flags off of people's accounts, it wouldn't surprise me to find out that there's no codified correlation between "has the AP running" flag and the "is running a Comcast router+modem" flag.
- 12y ago
- andrewhillman 12y agoI just had comcast to my home last week. I pay for 120 mbps but when connected via cat 5 it only reached 90 max mbps which would fine considering when using a wifi router it only reaches around 30 mbps. I have moved around the wifi router but it doesn't make much of a difference. The technician told me the 120 mbps that I am being charged for is for for direct access and wifi won't reach 120mbps. I complained to customer care saying if I go to the grocery store and pay for 120 items, I expect to get 120 items, not 30 items. I told them they should tell people upfront that 120 mbps is when you are plugged in directly since most people use a wifi router but this still doesn't make sense to me since they can easily downgrade you to, say, 6 mbps without a problem. Does anyone know if this OpenWRT works? I would love to push my speed to its limits. Comcast pretty much has a monopoly in my city and they are not very helpful.
- apenwarr 12y agoIt's extremely rare for OpenWRT to magically make your wifi connection's raw speed faster. It's good for many things, but not that. Wifi is extremely finicky, due to interference and the FCC's limits on legal transmit power levels. But you should be able to get same-room speeds of at least 180 megabits if you have a decent router and a client that supports it. The key things are you need to use a 5 GHz radio and (for distance) channel numbers >100. Many ISPs still give out 2.4 GHz-only radios, so performance will suck.
- icebraining 12y agoI don't see the problem. If you paid for 120 items and you can't carry them in your car, it's not the grocery store's fault, even if "most people" used small cars. If you want to get a better Wifi connection, get a good router and plug it in to the one installed by Comcast.
- minot 12y agoPersonally, I got an Asus router as well so this does not affect me. However, I can understand this from an average customer's point of view. It would be nice for the ISP to give a router that is good enough for the speed that they advertise. The router should not be the bottleneck.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- CodeWriter23 12y agoXfinity says your wireline speed will not be impeded by others who are using WiFi via the xfinitywifi shared service. Since DOCSIS 3.0 has no limit on the maximum number of channels (source http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Bandwidth_tables http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOCSIS#Bandwidth_tables ), I believe in order to make that claim, they have to allocate additional channels to the xfinitywifi traffic. BUT OP will only double his bandwidth if he is purchasing a rate less than or equal to the actual realized throughput of his WiFi connection, somewhere from 50-90Mbps. Additionally, all Cable modems have some kind of throttling because the speeds offered by ISPs (30x5, 100x8, etc.) are not evenly divisible by the per-channel rate of DOCSIS 2.0/3.0 (38Mbps Down, 27Mbps up). And then there's this: http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r29743167-Signals-Report-16-Downstream-Channel-Bonding-Here http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r29743167-Signals-Report-16-...
- windexh8er 12y agoEvery modem has a finite number of channels it can bond. Up and down are different. Also the CMTS (the device the cable modem connects to) limits the number of bonds per source modem. A piece of coax has a finite amount of bandwidth it can carry. As modulation schemes get better (QAM256) you can do more with less. To say DOCCIS 3 is limitless is not taking into consideration the hardware and frequency constraints. The more frequency you allocate to Internet the less is available for other programming (TV).
- CodeWriter23 12y agoYes, and more than a couple of people have observed downstream 16 channel bonding on Comcast. That would be 4 times as many as you cited "Most commonly 4 channel bond on the downstream and 2 on the up", in your post that I failed to reply to.
- windexh8er 12y agoI have Comcast 100Mb service and have 4 QAM256 bonded downstream right now. I've deployed and managed these networks (as a Comcast subsidiary in fact). 16 down doesn't mean anything other than fragmented frequency usage. If you have a Motorola cable modem go to: 192.168.100.1 to get to the web UI of your Surfboard. Click on the "Signal" tab at the top. My guess is the majority of people will see 4 x bonded down. Probably 2-3 bonded up using a lesser QAM as well. Not sure why all the hate - I'm a network engineer who's dealt with these networks and a lot of what's been posted here is incorrect.
- tkmcc 12y agoDo xfinitywifi hotspots permanently authenticate clients based only on their MAC addresses? A malicious client could easily find the MAC address of any device connected to a xfinitywifi hotspot (by using e.g. airodump-ng [0]) and then spoof that device's MAC address on their own computer to access the internet via the hotspot without any authentication. [0] http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=airodump-ng http://www.aircrack-ng.org/doku.php?id=airodump-ng
- aselzer 12y agoThat's basically the only way to do it. If it were really clever, it could ignore packets based on vendor extensions and device characteristics. They are not that easy to spoof (you would have to modify the driver, as opposed to just changing the MAC). I actually use this method to use school WiFi anonymously (or rather, as someone else).
- CHY872 12y agoMm not entirely - I'd imagine that they could fairly easily run wpa-enterprise, authenticating against Comcast servers. Then when a user tries to connect, they'd be asked for their Comcast creds, which they could type in once, and then be authenticated with on all such servers. It's how eduroam works, and that works fairly flawlessly (provided the routers have enough bandwidth).
- daniiyyel 12y agoWi-Fi Alliance released a new standard to solve hotspot roaming called "Passpoint". Time Warner Cable started using it for their hotspot authentication recently (in NYC at least). It works well in my experience. "Passpoint automates that entire process, enabling a seamless connection between hotspot networks and mobile devices, all while delivering the highest WPA2™ security. Passpoint is enabling a more cellular-like experience when connecting to Wi-Fi networks."
- leni536 12y agoThere is a bunch of non-broken (at least in design) client authentication protocols for WiFi. It's rarely used though since it causes problems on most devices and hard to set up (at least on win7 it didn't work for most people on my dorm).
- sajal83 12y agoAnother way for "bonding" would be to use mptcp ( http://multipath-tcp.org http://multipath-tcp.org ). You might need to patch and build openwrt yourself for it... The key difference is with mptcp each individual tcp connection uses both connections at the same time, rather than picking a lottery. I blogged about my setup at http://www.sajalkayan.com/post/fun-with-mptcp.html http://www.sajalkayan.com/post/fun-with-mptcp.html
- pyvpx 12y agoso many middleboxes out there, unfortunately. I've had success with both GRE and LISP tunnels in addition to utilizing MPTCP.
- jfroma 12y agoI use this very same feature of openwrt to load balance between my two ISPs. Here in argentina neither of the two ISP are reliable, but cheap enought if you really use then and you need reliability. I recommend multiwan3 as the op suggest, other pkgs didnt work for me. Some modern routers have two radios for 2.5 and 5ghz, but even with one radio openwrt allows you to set it up as client and ap. I find other features of openwrt quite amazing like dnsmasq. It is a really powerful firmware.
- listic 12y agoI was going to go with pfSense for that feature. Do you think it makes sense?
- jfroma 12y agoI used pfSense in a very different context (vpn gateway) and I used the vmware image option. I haven't used the multiwan feature and I don't know if it can be installed on (almost) any router as openwrt. I did tried dd-wrt for this same purpose, the interface is much better, it is very flexible as openwrt, but I couldn't put my wifi on client and AP mode at the same time and I needed to connect to one of my WAN using wifi because that modem is not close enough yet.
- pyvpx 12y agopfSense is a re-packaged FreeBSD. you'll find pfSense doesn't support as wide a variety of platforms (anything MIPS) or wireless cards.
- anonbanker 12y agothat's quite disingenuous. it uses pf, openSSH, and LibreSSL (in development version) from OpenBSD on top of a FreeBSD core, and it's wireless card support is not very much below linux (though you might need to work to get it up). if you have older x86 hardware, it's hard to top pfsense.
- anonbanker 12y agoif you have hardware that supports both pfsense and openWRT, choose pfsense. it's far more robust a package.
- TD-Linux 12y agoI also have XfinityWifi. The box that provides it is extremely buggy. I recommend setting it to "Bridge mode" (which turns it into a dumb modem) and then using OpenWRT in a normal, router configuration. You get a really good speed boost, especially over wifi, just by taking Xfinity's routing out of the equation.
- jebblue 12y agoHe's connecting to his neighbor's router seemingly without permission. "When you rent a cable modem/router combo from Comcast (as one of my nearby neighbors apparently does)" It may be illegal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_piggybacking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_piggybacking Comcast is not on the EFF's list of Wireless Friendly ISP's (referenced in the Wiki article): https://www.eff.org/pages/wireless-friendly-isps https://www.eff.org/pages/wireless-friendly-isps Even if it were: http://compnetworking.about.com/od/wirelessfaqs/f/legal_free_wifi.htm http://compnetworking.about.com/od/wirelessfaqs/f/legal_free... "Using a neighbor's wireless access point may not be legal even with their permission. "
- icehawk 12y agoxfinitywifi is provided by Comcast, you need a valid comcast login to connect. He is a Comcast subscriber himself, and thus he has a valid Comcast login.
- jebblue 12y agoIt has not been proven that Comcast has the authority to do this: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141208/13222529362/comcast-sued-over-router-update-that-makes-your-wi-fi-hotspot-public-ignores-your-opt-out-preferences.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20141208/13222529362/comca... It has been proven that in many places at least in the US, it is illegal and in some cases is a felony. Edit: Further, it is not a good idea to connect to any known SSID unless you know for a fact that it can be trusted: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/06/free-wi-fi-from-xfinity-and-att-also-frees-you-to-be-hacked/ http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/06/free-wi-fi-from-xfin... Your neighbor might be hacking you while you think you are legally using their hardware.
- tedunangst 12y agoWhat is a felony? Using Comcast?
- jebblue 12y ago
- aceperry 12y agoNow that the op has published this workaround, I have the feeling that Comcast will take steps to stop this from happening. Comcast's version of "customer service."
- logone 12y agoCould something like this (two ISP connections) be combined to use the speed of both links at once (i.e. speed up a single connection). Perhaps with the aide of a remote VPS?
- gtwy 12y agoI'm sorry but I can't take the author's advice on speed seriously when he's using Comcast's charge-you-every-month modem which is known to get terrible speeds to begin with. Let alone someone who is running wifi between their router and their modem. If you want the fastest speeds on Comcast, pick up a DOCSIS 3 Motorola Surfboard modem. I'm paying for 100/20. This is what I get with my surfboard http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4251868226 http://www.speedtest.net/my-result/4251868226
- narrowrail 12y agoIf you reread the post, it is his neighbor that is renting the modem/router, not him.