If you are to ask me Mike what type of Internet Connection should I make for my house or small office.
I've got one answer for you.
It's cable.
Cable does a great job for me and I've been extremely pleased over the many many gosh I almost can say
decades but I'd still say just a little over a decade of happy cable modem use. Now you need to appreciate
where cable modem comes from. It comes from the cable companies and it was very funny when cable first
came out because it was almost like asking your plumber to be a chef.
I mean we just couldn't put that together in our heads that the same people who were giving us HBO were
now suddenly giving us Internet connectivity.
Well now it's pretty much ubiquitous.
Everybody likes it and everybody uses it.
So the big piece that we're dealing with when it comes to cable is this guy right here.
So this is the back end of my cable modem.
Notice I've got an RJ 45.
That leads to my network over here.
And then I've got a cable connection and that's a F-Type screw in connection there.
There's also a USB. If I really wanted to I can use this for configuration.
I could actually connect to a single computer.
I've heard it's a very nice thing to do I don't do it.
And so that's really all a cable modem is all about. Cable's
pretty straightforward.
Unlike the DSL companies the cable companies never really tried very hard to do things like PPPoE,
I mean there's a few exceptions, but in general when you get cable today you plug in and everything runs
beautifully.
The only downside to cable is that cable companies in general really really don't like you to change
MAC addresses.
So if you were to plug a laptop into this cable modem on the first try it'll probably come right up.
But if you were to unplug this laptop and then plug a router into it a lot of times that can cause problems
with the cable company.
So it would require at least a phone call.
So one of the tricks we have with cable is that most routers are going to have a way for you to pretend
like your whatever machine you were plugged into.
Let me show you what I mean.
All right as we look through this router I'm looking for something called MAC address close. You see it
right there.
The whole idea of MAC address clone is simply to fool cable modems into thinking that the MAC address
is something they've already been plugged into.
So you don't have to go through the hassle of calling the cable company and having them do a reset.
So typically what people do when they first start setting up cable modems is they'll just plug their
laptop into it or whatever they have close by just to get it to work.
So one of the things it will have invariably is like clone my PCs MAC address.
So I would hit this and it would literally grab the MAC address of the computer I'm on right now and
then if I enable this it's going to change the MAC address of the WAN side of the router to match whatever
it was before.
Now this is actually my setup for my functioning network here in my house.
So if I click this it's going to change that number.
And guess what I would have to call the cable company.
So I'm not going to do that.
But the trick is as MAC address clone is really designed for cable modems. So do you get the impression
I like cable modems?
I do.
They're hardworking living down here in Houston.
I've literally been running through the middle of a hurricane with 98 mile an hour winds outside playing
World of Warcraft because my cable modems are so robust.
I do like cable modems.
Cable is considered to be faster than DSL. Network plus asks a couple of questions like that.
So if you have the choice three which is faster cable or DSL in general cable is faster although there
can be a lot of variance in those different types of solutions.
And the other thing to remember about DSL versus cable is that DSL was almost always going to be using
a PPPoE whereas cable almost never does. And with cable don't forget a MAC address clone could be your
best buddy if you want to avoid those phone calls.