Identical MAC addresses for wired and wireless LAN on access point

japlytic

Badcaps Legend

Join Date: Oct 2005

Posts: 2085

Country: Australia
#1

Identical MAC addresses for wired and wireless LAN on access point

09-09-2009, 03:35 AM

Interestingly, some (single-band) wireless access points have the same MAC address for both the wired (LAN) section and wireless (WLAN) section.
Is there any reason why some manufacturers do it? (Make it easier, maybe?)
One possible reason is to make it hard for ISPs to detect that you are sharing the connection.

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Player2

Senior Member

Join Date: Aug 2009

Posts: 98

Country: USA
#2

09-09-2009, 02:54 PM

Re: Identical MAC addresses for wired and wireless LAN on access point

Originally posted by japlytic

...One possible reason is to make it hard for ISPs to detect that you are sharing the connection.

I think you hit the nail on the head. I've seen a large number of DSL modems which are very picky about the MAC address. Most decent routers that don't share the same MAC for both connections still have an option in the configuration to clone the MAC address to fool these modems.
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