It has happened to the best of us: you’re in the middle of getting some work done, and right when you’re about to finish it and meet the deadline, a power outage happens, and your router dies. Even if you were using a laptop and it didn’t shut down as a result, there is still no internet because your router was plugged into the outlet. Storms have been gaining intensity over the past few years, and if a storm just knocked your power, Xfinity wants to keep you online with its new Storm-Ready Wi-Fi.
The Xfinity Storm-Ready Wi-Fi is basically a mobile Wi-Fi router that, in the event of a power outage, will keep running through cellular connection. When an emergency is not happening, the Storm-Ready Wi-Fi can run as a regular Wi-Fi extender, being Wi-Fi 6-capable and using the Xfinity 10G Network. When a storm causes your power grid to die, however, the device will keep running like normal with a 4-hour backup battery and connecting to cellular connectivity.
Whenever the device starts using cellular, you’ll get a notification, but you’ll stay connected even in the thunderiest of storms — provided, of course, than it’s a regular storm and not a hurricane or another climate event where a cell tower might get knocked out or something, at which point you probably have bigger issues to worry about. You’ll get unlimited data through the device, meaning that you should be able to use it just like you were using your wired Internet connection.
An important thing to have in mind is that this device doesn’t appear to support 5G connectivity. Instead, it’ll keep you online through the available 4G LTE connection. That’s not a huge problem now, given LTE should already be fast enough to get most work done, but it might mean your speeds get worse over time as carriers start to reallocate network bands from 4G and LTE to newer 5G technology.
If you want to give it a spin, you can check it out on Xfinity stores, and you can also buy it online for $7 a month for 36 months — coming up to just $252.
Source: Comcast