HP 8600 wireless printers quit working after upgrading to Xfinity XP8 Gateway

[Dan5610]

Resolution: The XP8 Gateway requires a service level wifi configuration change to enable/set the 2.4 GHz configuration for 802.11b.

The following information is my best interpretation from the conversation and observation with the Xfinity field service agent that got my HP 8600 wireless printers working after Xfinity replaced my prior Xfinity gateway with the newer XP8. The new gateway (XP8) now has 3 wifi frequencies; 2.4, 5, and 6 Ghz. To support configuration for 6Ghz, Xfinity eliminated 802.11b, which is used by many legacy devices like the HP 8600 printers, as part of the default 2.4 GHz configuration. The service level wifi configuration does have a drop down option selector, so the gateway can still be configured for 802.11b, but it is not accessible by a user and questionable as to whether Xfinity phone agents can access the setting. 

Another caveat is that once a user goes in and makes a change to the gateway via the user level wifi configuration, then even a field service agent using a laptop to access the gateway can’t access the service level wifi 802 setting as the selections are grayed out and no longer selectable. This happened to me because the Xfinity phone agent I spoke with earlier had me make changes in the user accessible wifi configuration and split the network, attempting to force the HP printers to connect at 2.4 GHz; which still didn’t work because the default 2.4GHz setting doesn’t use the needed 802.11b setting, and is not configurable at a user level. 

The field service agent had access to service level wifi configuration settings, but still had to do a factory reset on the gateway to gain access to the wifi 802 setting drop down so he could make the right 802.11b selection for the 2.4Ghz band. He then had to reconfigure the new gateway to my prior network and password to match what it was before. Once this was done, we went to one of my HP 8600 printers and ran its setup wizard to re-establish connection with the gateway. By time we went to my other HP 8600 printer, it had already automatically connected to the network.