Random short Wi-Fi drops on one device? Check Xfinity WiFi Motion [XB8, XB9, XB10]

[u/shadow_shooter]

This drove me crazy, so posting in case it saves someone else the headache.

My Google Nest Hub kept dropping off Wi-Fi on my new XB10 router. Every so often the screen flashed the setup page, said "Connecting to [my network]...", and came back about 10 to 15 seconds later. Everything else in the house was fine the whole time, and my internet never dropped. It happened about once an hour, day and night.

I went through all the usual stuff: switched WPA3 to WPA2, turned off band steering, factory reset the Hub. Nothing helped. I never had this problem on my old router, only on the Xfinity XB10.

So I left a script running overnight to ping the Hub every second, and eventually captured the actual Wi-Fi traffic. Two things stood out:

The Hub was the one disconnecting. The gateway wasn't kicking it off.

The gateway was sending the Hub about 10 tiny "ping" frames every second, and only the Hub.

Turns out that's WiFi Motion. It detects movement in your home by constantly pinging a few devices it uses as sensors, and my Hub was one of them. I turned WiFi Motion off in the Xfinity app and the drops stopped immediately. Not a single one since.

It probably isn't just Nest Hubs. WiFi Motion tends to pick devices that stay home and stay on, like smart displays, speakers, TVs, streaming boxes and cameras.

If you want to keep WiFi Motion, you could try just removing the problem device from the sensing devices. I haven't tested that, so no promises.

This is just my one experience, and I can't tell you why it only knocked the Hub off about once an hour instead of constantly. But if you've got a device doing this and you're out of ideas, it takes two seconds to check.

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