wireless internet

[bailey]

I thought this was strange:

when I was in kansas city I had a roadrunner cable connection and used a linksys b router for the network, then I replaced the b router with the g router and all worked fine with no changes at all.

but here in Port Hope Michigan it it a bit differant, we have cable tv but its not on a wired cable, it on a microwave antenna on our tower.
and for the internet it also has a seperate microwave antenna, and when I replaced the linksys b router that I had on the network here with a g router it would not work on the internet untill I called the isp to give them the mac address of the router, as soon as they typed it into there computer, it only took a matter of a few seconds for the internet to be working.

why would they need the mac address of the router plus the mac address of the modem ?

[maxnik]

could it be for the same reason, why we set up MAC address access list in our 802.11 routers at home to keep other people from connecting through our networks? I would imagine someone could try to set up microwave antenna like theirs and try to get internet for free...

[bailey]

Originally Posted by maxnik could it be for the same reason, why we set up MAC address access list in our 802.11 routers at home to keep other people from connecting through our networks? I would imagine someone could try to set up microwave antenna like theirs and try to get internet for free...

the mac address on the modem alone would take care of that.

[glc]

Cable providers and DHCP DSL providers used to do this too - for authentication they needed the MAC of both the modem and the next device downstream, whether it was a NIC or a router. That's why routers have a MAC clone function. We used to have to clone the NIC MAC into the router when we went in and added a router to a standalone installation. The newer systems don't do this any more, but you still have to power cycle the cable modem to pick up the new MAC of the router.

If you ever have to change out your router, you can clone the MAC of your registered router into the new router instead of calling them again. If you ever have to connect direct to your NIC, then you are going to have to call.

[bailey]

thanks, that cleared that question.