Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Xfinity Mobile’s WiFi PowerBoost lets your phone access Wi-Fi speeds in excess of the internet plan you’re paying for.
- So far it’s supported iPhones and Samsung Galaxy flagships and mid-rangers, but not Android phones at large.
- New settings for “Xfinity Speed Boost” in Google’s Adaptive Connectivity Service app suggest availability could be improving.
Going online with your smartphone over a Wi-Fi connection can offer a lot of advantages compared to a cellular connection. But ultimately, what you get out of Wi-Fi is limited by the internet connection feeding it; if you’re only paying for a 300Mbps plan with your ISP, you’ve got no hope of your Wi-Fi speeds surpassing that, right? You’d think so, but thanks to the existence of companies that offer both cellular and wired home internet service, there’s a special edge case where this isn’t necessarily true — and we just spotted something that points to Pixel phones getting access to this trick on Xfinity.
Xfinity Mobile offers a feature for its users called WiFi PowerBoost. Basically, when you connect your Xfinity Mobile phone to a compatible Wi-Fi router that’s using Xfinity as its ISP, the router will automatically raise speeds to up to 1Gbps, even if subscribed to a slower plan. That doesn’t even have to be your home router, either.
Maybe the most limiting factor there is the list of supported phones, and while PowerBoost works with iPhones, as well as both Samsung flagship and mid-range models, that list doesn’t include Google Pixel phones. Or at least, it hasn’t so far.
Spectrum Mobile also offers a similar service, branded as Spectrum Speed Boost. And we’ve already seen Google supporting that in the company’s Adaptive Connectivity Service app. With the app’s new p.2025.22 release, however, we’ve spotted a very similar-looking new entry for “Xfinity Speed Boost.”
While we have not yet been able to formally confirm, this sure sounds like it’s talking about WiFi PowerBoost, only carrying over the existing Spectrum branding that was in the app. The description of the functionality included sure seems to align with what we know of the service, and its presence here strongly suggests that we could be seeing PowerBoost expand to support Pixel phones.
Hopefully we’ll get some formal confirmation from Xfinity soon, and maybe learn precisely the scope of this broadening support.
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