Some ISPs (most notably MediaOne) use your NIC’s MAC address to authenticate your service.\u00a0 When you change the computer that you have connected to your cable modem service, you usually have to call up Tech Support and give them the MAC address of the NIC in the new machine.\u00a0\u00a0 Since hardware routers have the equivalent of a NIC on their WAN port in order to connect to your cable modem, you would have to do the same thing if you’re installing a router.<\/p>\n
Recently, however, some ISPs have started to recognize the MAC addresses of popular routers and disconnect service if a router is detected.\u00a0 Fortunately, many router manufacturers are including the capability to either set the router WAN port MAC address to anything you want, or copy it from a computer connected to the router LAN side.\u00a0 You can check the Router comparison chart under “Mac addr. clone” to see which routers support this feature.\u00a0 Then consult the router’s documentation for directions on using the feature.<\/p>\n
If you use the feature, make sure you copy the MAC address from the computer that was used when your cable modem service was installed.\u00a0 You can find the MAC address by using the\u00a0winipcfg<\/b>\u00a0command in Win95 & 98,\u00a0ipconfig<\/b>\u00a0command in Win NT, and the\u00a0Info Button<\/b>\u00a0on the TCP\/IP Control Panel on a MacOS<\/a> machine.\u00a0 Look for “Adapter Address”, “MAC address”, “Hardware Address”, or a number containing six pair of Hexadecimal digits such as:\u00a003-EF-DF-5D-3E-23.<\/b><\/p>\n After you set the new address, you’ll probably need to power down your router, power cycle your cable modem, then power up your router in order to properly connect to your ISP.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Some ISPs (most notably MediaOne) use your NIC’s MAC address to authenticate your service.\u00a0 When you change the computer that you have connected to your cable modem service, you usually have to call up Tech Support and give them the MAC address of the NIC in the new machine.\u00a0\u00a0 Since hardware routers have the equivalent of a NIC on their WAN port in order to connect to your cable modem, you would have to do the same thing if you’re installing a router. Recently, however, some ISPs have started to recognize the MAC addresses of popular routers and disconnect service <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5591,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6895,"href":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81\/revisions\/6895"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.practicallynetworked.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}