I’ve recently been having some trouble connecting to the Xfinitywifi hotspot. I will attempt to connect or after a while will just drop to a “limited” connection in Windows 8.1. If I’m just now connecting it will say “it’s taking longer than usual” and then finally just end with a “limited” connection and have a little exclamation mark over the icon in my system tray.

When it does this you can go to your Network Connections window in Windows 8.1 and it will say Unknown Network instead of xfinitywifi. Then on top of that if you open a command window and type ipconfig you’ll get just blanks where you should have a gateway and ip address.

The one thing that finally managed to fix it for me was using the hardware on my laptop to disable the wifi and re-enable it. On my Asus that means putting it in “Airplane” mode (fn+F2) and then taking it back out again. Then I’d open my list of wireless networks, right click the xfinitywifi connection and click Forget This Network.

This happens quite frequently so I’ll update if it quits working or no longer fixes the problem when it happens or if it just turns out that I did something else that I’m forgetting to add here.