Cable Modem Help

amrit50 · 05-31-2006, 01:00 PM

I have a question for you guys...
We rent a beach house yearly for one week, (2 hours away) and last year I signed up for road runner for one month while I was down there so we could have high speed internet. The closest place to get the modem was 45 minutes away from the beach. All they did was turn on the modem at the time warner store and hand it to me. It worked at both beach houses that we rent. My question is, can I just bring my activated modem with me to the beach and use it there? Or will it not work, b/c it's 2 hours away?

Puffanug · 05-31-2006, 01:03 PM

It's worth a try. They did more than activate your modem though. They most likely logged the MAC address of the modem. How far apart were the two beach houses it worked at? Is the 3rd beach house use the same cable company?

amrit50 · 05-31-2006, 01:10 PM

here is a map:

http://www.blackboxcarputers.com/temp/map.jpg

I live in raliegh (top), the modem was picked up in wilmington (green flag), and used at Holden Beach (red flag)...

Time warner has the service in all 3 areas..the 2 beach houses are side by side.

RPI Geek · 05-31-2006, 01:13 PM

I worked at a cable company for a while (it was a few years ago but things probably haven't changed much), and there was no real way to tell exactly where the modem was located. There were large areas that it could be narrowed down to, but these areas were 20 to 30-ish miles in diameter. They _can_ find out the MAC address, and know that it was your modem that you brought to another area, but usually only if it's the same cable company, and sometimes it's hard to track them across large distances.

Another story: I lived for a summer in Connecticut, and one of the guys I lived with had about 3 cable modems... He would just rotate them out when they got switched off... They lasted anywhere from a week to a month. Sometimes he could even rotate the oldest one in and get service back on it!

You're probably better off just piggybacking on someone's WiFi, though.

amrit50 · 05-31-2006, 01:15 PM

thanks for the info..so I'm probably best off getting the 1 month of service to make sure it works. Last year when we were there, there was no wifi around.

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