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

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

WEP implementations don't work well cross-platform. Airports using WEP work great with Macs and Linksys (for example) wireless routers work with PCs. They don't work well if you mix them. Apple does something funky with the password that makes it not match. You can get around this if you get the hex password from the Linksys-equivalent and enter it as hex on the Mac but, in practice, I've found that to be dicey. If you use WPA, it seems to not have those problems. Other people can probably provide more details. Good luck!

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

re: out of the box
I don't know if this will make you feel better or not, but we've been trying to get the wireless, the Tivo, the PC desktop and the PC laptop to play nicely together for almost six months now and we still have problems.

Wireless -- router technology, in particular, is anything but "out of the box" ready.

[ralphmelton.livejournal.com]

I can't remember the answers to this issue of MacOS vs. non-Apple wireless devices, but I know that Kevin has helped me with those answers.

(After consulting with Kevin on this, I've chosen to leave my wireless network unsecured. Wireless security only really protects access to the bandwidth, and if someone steals enough of my bandwidth that I notice, I can secure the network then.)

[grouchyoldcoot.livejournal.com]

I don't know if Apple shares WEP code between Macbooks and iphones, but I can't get my iphone to reliably work with WEP. It works briefly, but then fails. With WEP turned off everything is fine. Neither the FIOS router nor the iphone (I think) support WPA.

Things worked just fine out of the box with FIOS wireless and Linux- at least until I upgraded my laptop to an unsupported model :-\ .

[steven.livejournal.com]

It's funny you should mention this: I have an iBook that also won't connect to my wireless network. Same reason: rejected password. The PowerBook G4 and the MacBook Pro, however, connect just fine.

Please post the resolution when you and Muhammad arrive at one. I'm curious!

[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.)

[http://users.livejournal.com/merle_/]

I never got my Mac Mini to talk to the wireless router either. XP laptop, TiVo, Roku, work laptop.. everything else pretty much just works (after typing in a long hex string and updating the MAC filter to allow that device), but even with everything open the Mac just won't talk to the network. It's okay for me since it is a stationary device and I had a cable I could stretch, but is still frustrating.