i biked to the cafe a bit before noontime to fix the wifi router at my sister’s place. i’d already lent her my own router, which worked for a night before it also didn’t work. the problem seemed like it was cablemodem related, especially since the online light wasn’t even on. i called comcast, did some troubleshooting, but the technician didn’t give me much options, said maybe my cablemodem was too old, and the fact that it was my own purchased modem (i didn’t want to pay the $8/month rental fee) meant they had no obligation to help me out any further. his advice: just get a comcast cablemodem and eat the rental cost.
jack showed up at the cafe, and later so did binbin and her infant son. after i finished eating lunch, my father and i went to the comcast office to pick up a modem. i didn’t realize they moved from their old office on sherman street to a new place on the corner of kirkland and beacon street (just a few blocks from my house), formerly a blockbuster videos.
back at my sister’s place i couldn’t get the new modem to work. when i called comcast, the agent told me to call back in 3 hours with no explanation. i finally fished out that they were having some network issues on their end, but still, i wasn’t willing to wait another 3 hours. after my father and i relocated the coaxial cable from the multi-splitter outside, i got all the relevant lights to glow steady except for the online light, which never even turned on. on a whim i tried the old modem and wouldn’t you know it all the lights turned on! except i just couldn’t get online, despite being assigned a working IP address in my network settings. so i called comcast again, asking the technician to see if my old cablemodem was still registered. i never got the answer i wanted, but he was willing to add my MAC address to their database again. after a few minutes of being on hold, i finally got the internet to work!
but once i connected my wireless router it was a different story, and i was once again unable to see the internet. i tried my router, and i tried the old router, but neither worked. i couldn’t understand why, an even tried mirroring the MAC address of the cable modem but that didn’t work either. i finally did a reset on the old netgear router. logging into the admin page via ethernet cable, i went through the easy setup, set up a wireless network with password, and viola! wireless internet!
i was going to go back to my own house, but my mother said they were having pizza so i biked to belmont instead for dinner, before returning to cambridge.
tomorrow, i’m returning that new cable modem, and seeing if i can reconfigure my cable channel settings (i only have basic cable right now, which is actually mostly just the broadcast channels i can pull right right from the air without a cable box).