Comcast doesn't bother to take into account the density of some of their installs when doing this either. My apartment sees 5 full strength XFinitiWiFi access points, and about 5 more at lesser signal strength. Seems their little "have a snack and wine while socializing with neighbors" events has gotten a lot of people to sign up for their service in my apartment. Been making sure to post the flyer for the much better local Internet provider on the community board for those around me not interested in cable TV.

I accidentally joined one of these networks on my Mac, and it lead to a support call with Apple for a bit. iCloud can sync preferred WiFi networks (and passwords if needed via Keychain) between Macs and iOS devices. Discovered a design flaw in how this is handed on the Mac side.

If a Mac has two user accounts, with two different iCloud accounts in use, the preferred WiFi networks will end up merging between the two iCloud accounts. (I have two accounts for testing, usually for beta releases.) Due to the way it was implemented, it makes it difficult to remove a network. Signing back into the other account may restore the removed network, as iCloud for the second account sees it as missing from the machine and restores the network.

For about a month, I'd have a random chance of waking up to my iPhone on the XFinity network, displaying the portal page to sign in. My own router was suffering some power loss issues due to a failing UPS, and the phone would see my network disappear thus triggering a search for WiFi overnight.

The support case went all the way to Apple engineering, who was trying to track down a bug or some error that would hint at the issue. Took me enabling some real time logging on the laptop, and signing into the second account on the desktop to discover the design flaw.

In parallel to the efforts with Apple, I engaged Comcast support via Twitter. That was amusing. They missed me telling them that I wasn't a customer, and at some point rebooted someone else's router as a result.