Verizon, round N

[cellio]

Dealing with Verizon has gotten less excruciating since I acquired the direct-dial number of someone in tier-3 tech support who seems to have a clue. We are definitely into the second-order problems now.

Muhammad (who I spoke with last week) did not approve of our modem, so he sent us a new combined modem/router (including wireless). It came today; if any paper it shipped with had included the modem's user name and password, I might not have needed to call for help in setting it up. The internet side of this is fine.

So far we have been unable to get the wireless to work with either Mac in the house (the only wireless devices we have). With WEP turned on, the password is simply not accepted. If we turn WEP off and go to MAC authentication instead, neither machine can see the network. If we turn off all security everything works fine, but we're not interested in doing that.

Right now our solution is to leave the wireless turned off unless we actively need it, but that's a short-term solution. To his credit, Muhammad said he would research this and call me back tomorrow. (I think he will; he also called earlier today to confirm the modem had arrived.) Muhammad isn't a Mac user (he called back to say "what OS?" and when I said "10.4" he asked if that was sufficient ID), so we'll see what happens. So far what Google is telling me is that other people with iBooks have had this problem.

Wireless is new to me (I've used other people's networks but never administered one). I thought it pretty much just worked out of the box these days, but I guess not.

Comments

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

That MAC filtering prevents the wireless being seen sounds extremely fishy. As in, I've never seen it work like that before--usually the network can been seen but not joined.

For extra complexity, once you do get wireless up you may need to spend some time fiddling with what channel it's on. I've been trying to find an interference-free one for us for a while now, but there are enough other networks around that there are often collisions. (And in the higher range, collisions with microwave ovens as well.)

[cellio]

You're right; I was imprecise. With MAC addressing turned on and WEP turned off, both machines can see that the network exists but can't actually talk to it.

Muhammad told me to use channel 11. I didn't ask why and haven't researched that yet.

[geekosaur]

Wireless uses spread spectrum centered around the band frequency; the width is greater than the separation between bands, so there is overlap between most channels. Channels 1, 6, and 11 don't overlap each other, so you should use whichever one of the three has the least interference.