[SOLVED] wifi situation from hell

[Computanoob]

So i moved into a place six months ago with wifi included so we never see our bill. Very quickly we had problems. During the day sometimes I would test 70 Mbps, then at night it would be less than 1mbps at times. I found out we have a ubee router that belongs to the internet company. There is a 2008 Airport extreme router coming off of it. It randomly gets messed up, and if it gets unplugged the entire system usually need s a full reset.

I decided to try and make the ubee router the wifi. But of course apparently our ISP has some firmware block on that so that we can't do it and furthermore I can not even access the advanced options tab when logging into the router page in order to port forward and do other such things. Is this possible for the ISP to block so many tabs of settings on the router? I know they can stop you from making wifi, but how can they stop me from port forwarding? IF I get my own cablemodem/router will they block me on that as well?

I would post a screenshot but this website as helpful as it's community is makes so god damned difficult to do that.
thanks

 

[bill001g]

The wifi you can likely fix just by using some other router as a AP rather than the airport extreme.

The port forwarding and other router setting you likely can do nothing about. It actually is really simple for them to limit features. They likely buy thousands of these devices and all they need to do is ask for a custom firmware image from the vendor. This is extremely common when the device also contains voice telephone ports.

A cable modem is hard to add to any cable system even those you pay for. Anyone can go out and tap into the coax cable and hook up a cable modem. What prevent you from stealing the service is the ISP will only talk to modems that are in its database of active accounts. On systems that allow you to buy your own cable modem you must still call up the ISP and give them the mac address of the modem and have them tie it to your account.

Even if you were to accomplish replacing the modem/router it does not mean port forwarding will work. In these type of installs it is extremely common to use private IP addresses and run NAT in the ISP network.

This is one of those you get what you pay for things I suspect. When you actually pay for service the ISP to some point cares if you cancel service or not. When you have a situation like yours providing poor service has no downside they figure very few people will move to a new apartment because of it. People like me would since how good the internet is right up there with how well the heat works.

Does the ISP offer a monthly paid service. Can you get service from another ISP maybe something like DSL on the telephone lines.