What was he thinking?
So you’re a cable repair guy. you go to someone’s house and there’s obviously a network running. The cable modem is giving the customer problems, so you decide to try and replace it. In fact the tech support folks on the phone told the customer that there seems to be a recent history of the modem losing connection to their network when they’re setting up the appointment for you to come out. Only you don’t just replace it, and see if that solves the problem oh no. You take it upon yourself to figure out if maybe it the customer’s router by plugging the cable modem straight into one of the PC’s. When you realize that even then the modem is inconsistently connecting you go ahead and switch it out, and you leave.
Yes you leave, with the modem connected to one PC, set to only pass traffic to that MAC address. So when the customer goes to hook his network back up nothing works. The router won’t get an IP address, traffic won’t pass from the Internet through it and the customer has to spend quite a bit of time figuring out that he needs to clone the MAC address of his wife’s Mac to the router, then reset both the router, and the wireless access point before anything will work again.
Ugh! Sometimes Time Warner really drives me nuts.
I work Tier 2 for TWC / RR. All you had to do was powercycle the modem, that’s it. The modem indeed will only provide internet access to that mac, but only until it’s powercycled. So you didn’t need to clone the mac id or anything. If you happen to have digital phone, remove power, wait, hit reset pinhole at back (to force reset if it has battery back up) and good to go. Had you called tech support they could have told you this. This is not a TWC / RR specific thing. There are other cable ISP’s that operate this way. I knew about it for mine before I worked for TWC / RR.
Thanks, that’s good to know for the next time they replace the modem. 🙂
On the other hand, I shouldn’t have to call tech support to recover from the work done by a company’s tech on site! I’d like to think that a responsible tech would leave things the way he found them after identifying and fixing the problem as opposed to leaving the customer still needing to call tech support to get things back the way they were.