Question Astound/RCN giving me out of state IPs

[Henderson]

I'm located near Chicago, but since last week I'm getting an IP from Astound that shows me in Texas (depending on which geolocation service used also shows New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and 1 shows Illinois). It's usually not a problem except that now for NFL games, we're not getting access to games we should. I've gone through everything with their tech support, they're saying it's my equipment (I do not rent their modem or router). At first they said it's the router, misinterpreting what they send and the router is incorrectly converting that to the out of state IP. I've disconnected the router and wired one PC direct to the modem, and it's still giving me the same IPs from the same region in Austin, Texas. If it were my faulty equipment, wouldn't they at least incorrectly give me different IP ranges? I've reset both the modem and router to factory defaults through all this, no change.

I originally signed up with WOW last January, and in February this happened once before while still WOW. I got around it by using MAC Cloning through my router and that got me into the next suburb over, but that's not working this time. It just kicks me up 1 number each time I try a different MAC address. SlingTV is giving me Fox and NBC from Philadelphia. We couldn't watch the Sunday game through Paramount+ probably because they showed us in PA is my guess. I'm guessing games through Amazon come Thursday will be similarly affected. I'm trying to contact services if they have a way to manually set location, but I'm not hopeful.

I tried setting it up to rent Astound's modem for a month, but because of pricing between WOW and now RCN, if/when I returned the modem after even a few days once knowing if it will give me a local IP or not, I'll still end up paying $15/month more for the same service without their modem because now taxes will be added, and that's where I draw the line trying to rule my equipment out.

Does this make sense though that my equipment could be consistently giving me out of state IPs all of a sudden after 8 months of perfect service? I always thought the IP comes straight from the ISP and there's no way I can change it? I've even thought of getting a VPN to force my location from where I really live, which seems absurd. I'm thinking changing ISPs is going to be the only option here, but I'm hoping there's a solution out there somewhere.

 

[bill001g]

I always thought the IP comes straight from the ISP and there's no way I can change it?

This is key issue the ISP is a idiot if they think your equipment can affect it.

Could be this is some new block the ISP recently got or maybe they moved it from one area of their network to another. The problem is not actually even the ISP it is the locator services. The locator services can be pretty worthless at times and you get companies that then accept this worthless data and try to limit their customers. The actual internet routers knows exactly where the IP block is located...well they know the path to it. It wouldn't work if the routing was wrong but these locator services use garbage like the address of the ISP office or even crazy stuff like looking for common hotspots to try to pin it down to a street.

The block the ISP uses is generally hard to change since they have it allocated to one areas of a city.

Your only real option is going to be to see if you can call the company and convince them the locator service they are using is wrong and they need to fix it. Not real likely they care even if you threaten to cancel the service.

A VPN might work but in many cases these type of companies have blocked the vpn IP blocks, this is how someone from outside the country would gain access. Hard to say I know for example netflix blocks a bunch of VPN companies but many people say nordvpn works and that is likely the largest vpn used. They must have paid off netflix because if netflix really wanted to block vpn you think they would start the largest one.

 

[Henderson]

I didn't think about services that block VPNs, so that wouldn't even be an option. Unless I can come up with some other way to force an IP change that is anywhere near my real location, I'm back to thinking changing ISPs is going to be the only solution. I've got pricing through January, but I still might switch early.

Thank you for the response, that was my understanding as well... my equipment can't do anything to change the incoming IP.