NTL and MAC codes?

[mikeco]

i was installing a router for a friend who has NTL and i spent an hour nd a half trying to get the thing to work got it to work tho and they gave me £15 for doing it tho

got it working after finding out that the USB ethernet port i wasnt using had a different MAC address to the other ethernet port i was using.

ended up having to find out the MAC address for it from CMD and entering it manualy to the router to get it working.

but why are NTL stuck up about MAC addresses? why dont they accept new MAC addresses to connect to the internet? do they only allow the 1 that u 1st connect with or something?

i dont have NTL myself nd never bothered to read about what they do with there ISP. would like to more abit more about it.

[lynx]

AFAIK, with a cable line (and depending on the type of network) any household could, in theory, make multiple connections to the network if they put in extra cable modems. Very simple to do and costly for the provider to detect where these extra modems are.

The only way the provider can prevent this is to allocate an IP address based on the MAC address. That way, it doesn't matter how many modems there are on the line, only the allocated address will operate.

The drawback is that the provider needs to know the MAC address.