@home cable access; Qwest DSL access: reports continue

@home cable access We continue to get both positive and negative feedback regarding the fallout from last week's excite@home court ruling (see previous items one, two, three, and four). We have received many reports from @home users that lost their cable access over the week-end but have since had it restored.

Cox@home users received an email stating: "Good news! Due to an agreement with our vendor, your Cox @Home high-speed Internet service will continue as we transition over the next few months to our own Cox-managed network."

More generally, whether your news is good or bad appears to depend on your geography and your cable provider. Here are a couple of highlights:

Switch to DHCP Rich Sefcik writes: "I was switched from @home to @attbi on Tuesday AM. My Xsense router, previously working with settings for a static IP I manually set, is now not working even though @attbi is a dynamic DHCP and the router has been set to same."

David Badovinac had better luck: "I thought you'd like to know that my AT&T cable connection came back on today at 3 PM. All I had to do was change to connect via DHCP, and, after a wait of about two seconds, I had a new IP address. So far, AT&T's connection is stable and fast."

Can't use router anymore? A reader writes: "With my AT&T@Home service I had a Linksys router serving as a firewall for protection. The service is back up, but only if I connect my Mac directly to the cable modem. They are using a MAC address authentication scheme (I think) to prevent "home networking" as they want users to pay $5 extra per computer in the home. But even if I pay the extra $5, it means that I can't bring a laptop home from work to do telecommuting - as you have to register with AT&T the MAC address for each computer connected to your home LAN."

Update: Rob Morton replies: "Please tell everyone to update to the latest firmware on their routers. The Linksys issue with using a MAC address is outdated. Using the newest firmware, you can enter any MAC address you want and the router will pretend. As soon as the cable companies come up with a way to limit the users, the router companies are updating their firmware to get around it." Many readers confirm that most routers now have this "spoofing" feature.

Another reader adds: "It's important that you only clone or duplicate the MAC address if your broadband router/gateway has a LAN and WAN port. Some older gateways had a single Ethernet port which you would plug into an Ethernet hub. You can't have two devices live happily on the same LAN segment, just like you can have two machines with the same IP number."

Otherwise, Daniel Griscom offers: "If your router can't change its external MAC address, then have the cable company change the registered MAC address to the router's."

Yet another reader contends that, at least in his area, AT&T is not locking down MAC addresses at all. Using DHCP instead of a fixed address was all that was need to get things to work.

Qwest redux Regarding our previous coverage of Qwest DSL access (see previous item), here's one more follow-up: Several readers, including Casey Common, pointed us to this Qwest FAQ item, stating: "Qwest® and MSN are working hard to deliver great narrowband and Qwest DSLTM services to all customers. A Macintosh optimized upgrade solution will be available in the coming months. In the meantime, your current Qwest.net service will remain the same."

Casey adds: "Here's the catch for Mac users: Microsoft does not yet have a Mac version of MSN Internet Access. So that's why a new customer who has a Mac would be signed up with a Qwest.net account. Then, when MSN for Mac is ready, Mac users would have to switch over to MSN. An earlier e-mail I received from Qwest says that MSN for Mac is expected to be ready sometime in early 2002."

Update: To clarify: As we have said before, the move to MSN is not your only option. You can choose another ISP.