My new Comcast internet connection has been tremendously frustrating so far, but now everything is working and I am happily posting from my own wireless.

The initial problem is that you have to activate your Comcast service with a PC (and not a Mac or anything else) connected directly to your modem. This registers the MAC address of your modem with Comcast. It also registers the address of the PC, meaning that any other device hooked up to the modem is refused a connection. My Airport Extreme, sadly, wasn’t terribly extreme with no internet connection.

I researched my problem online for a while, growing increasingly frustrated when it seemed I would have to buy a new router to satisfy my new ISP Overlord. The solution I saw repeated was using the router to spoof the MAC address of the original PC. While this is a fine and respectably geeky way to solve the problem, I’d rather not buy a new router.

It turns out I had neglected a chief rule of tech support: Restart the thing. Another site I found declared that the PC’s MAC address is only registered in the Cable Modem, not at Comcast. A hard reset of the modem opens it up to latch on to a new device, in this case my Airport Extreme. Everything is working nicely now, and I didn’t even have to deal with customer service!