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Cable modems

What ever happened to the pain of cable modems? I remember back when hooking up the modem to a different computer meant calling up the cable company and reading them the new MAC address.

Tonight I dropped by my parents' house. They get the internet with DirecTV DSL, which is shutting down. I was initially not interested in cable, but I looked up the rates, and they've fallen significantly since I last looked at them. They're down to $50/mo, which is reasonable. What I found amusing was that if you ordered your Time Warner cable modem through Earthlink, it was only $42/mo. So that's what I did.

I filed the request online, got a call a few days later, and set up an appointment for the following week. Today the guy came, pulled a line, and dropped a cable modem in the house. All I had to do was hook the cable modem to the hub, make sure that the Airport Base Station was the only DHCP client (it was) and it all worked.

Now, that's the way it should be. The modem shouldn't care who's DHCPing, and it doesn't. It shouldn't be expensive, and it isn't.

This almost seems too easy.

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