So I had a little extra time without wife or kids this afternoon and decided to piddle. Having come from Xfinity Post Paid to Prepaid (the Original, not the new Prepaid Now) I had always understood you could not use your own modem. Well, being one of those people, I decided to test that theory today. My XB3 is in bridge mode to my owned router, so it was easy just to leave my entire network plugged in to screw around with provisioning a different modem. I grabbed a laptop (older one, the newer ones in the house don’t even have ethernet sheesh) and my Netgear CM1000v2 from the bin where it’s been sitting useless since going to Prepaid. Proceeded to try and break things making my owned modem work on Prepaid, a feat they said was not possible.
The experiment was a success, but only partially and it took some doing. I tried the old fashioned way first, of letting the owned modem power up and get recognized and then opening a web browser on the laptop which gave me the walled garden page. I clicked the link to manually provision and it asked for login, but Xfinity wouldn’t recognize the Prepaid account credentials and kept booting me back to the start. Dang.
Then I opened the Xfinity app on my Iphone - not the Prepaid app, the actual Xfinity app. Last year, they combined Prepaid with Post Paid and you could look up certain Prepaid account info on the main Xfinity website if you weren’t a Post Paid customer. Was hoping the app was the same, and it is. I was able to “add device” for activation, scan the mac code on my modem with my phone camera and the app took me through the screens, told me modem was rebooting, and voila. I was online using my own modem on a Prepaid account.
The speed tests I ran on the Netgear modem using the laptop were surprising - just over 700Mbps down but only 6Mbps up (OG Prepaid is 200 / 20 same as Now200). It was like it provisioned an old Blast Pro or Extreme tier from back in the day, as 600/5 with 20% over-provision would be just about what I was getting. Also, the Prepaid portal never showed a change to the new modem even though it was working, so I am guessing at some point you might get flagged and possibly terminated. I also have no idea if this little trick will work on the new Now tiers, but not sure why it wouldn’t. After playing a bit I hooked the cable back up to the XB3 and once again used the regular Xfinity phone app to go back to it just as it was before.
Yeah, useless information and ultimately waste of time, but I thought some of you tech nerds might find it interesting. It was also nice to see for myself if this could be done, and at least I know I have a backup unit on hand if this refurb XB3 goes tits up.