Arris Cable Modems and Wireless Routers

Henry's Transcoding MKV/OGM to MP4 tutorial is the most popular entry on our blog, since many people find it via its Google search results position, so I thought I'd try to increase my practical post count in hopes of dethroning him solving people's problems.

Here's one I came across in helping some family friends with their home networking troubles ...

Having trouble getting your Arris telephony cable modem (used for digital phone and internet) to work with your wireless router, while it works fine with your PC?

The solution is to press the reset button on the back of the Arris device and make sure that the router is the first thing you plug in to its Ethernet jack afterwards. Just unplugging it and plugging it back in — the method Kyle Broflovski used to fix the giant Linksys Wi-Fi router we call the internet — won't work.

In my friends' case, it was a model TM502 modem from Time Warner Cable and a Netgear wireless router, but I think the same solution applies to TM402 models, Comcast or Cox cable, or other wireless and non-wireless brands of routers (e.g., Linksys, Belkin, Apple AirPort).

The Arris modem remembers the MAC address of the first device it connects to and won't work with any other device (even another computer) until it's reset. I suspect that the cable companies like this feature because they can instruct their installers to connect the modem to your "primary PC" and then force you to either pay some kind of extra "home networking fee" or at least pay for a service call to have someone come out and "upgrade" you.