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Problem: You can access the Internet when your PC is attached directly to your cable modem, but when you put a router between your PC and the cable modem, you can no longer access the Internet.

Explanation: Cable modems use the Media Access Controller (MAC) address of your PC to talk with the cable company. When you insert a router between the two, it prevents your cable modem from seeing your PC’s MAC address. This causes communication between your cable modem and the cable company to break down.

Solution: Change your router’s MAC address to be the same as your PC’s MAC address.

How to do it: If the setup screen on your router has something called “Clone MAC” or similar, then you may be able to take the easy path, depending on whether or not your router supports automatic cloning.

1. Connect an Ethernet cable from your PC to one of the Local Area Network (LAN) ports on the back of the router.

2. Connect your router’s Wide Area Network (WAN) ports to the cable modem.

3. Hit the button to clone your PC’s MAC address. From this point forward, your router will use your PC’s MAC address, making the cable modem think it’s talking directly to your PC.

If you don’t have such a setup screen or your router doesn't support automatic cloning, then you’ll have to take a slightly more difficult path. Follow these instructions:

1. Assuming you’re using Microsoft, open a command window and type in “ipconfig /all” without the quotes, then hit the enter key.

2. Look carefully at the results. You should see a line that says, “Physical Address . . . . . 00-11-23-4A-8F-37”. The six pairs of characters separated by hyphens is your MAC address; the characters shown here will be different than the results you get. If you see more than one entry with a MAC address, then you have more than one port on your PC. You’ll have to take an educated guess as to which is the right one, but if you guess wrong the first time, you can always go back and try a different MAC address on the next time.

3. Use your browser to look at your router’s setup. You may have to search for a while, but you should eventually see something like, “Physical Address,” or “WAN MAC Address” or similar. This may also appear within the "Clone MAC" screen, where you have to manually put in your MAC address.  Within the text box of this entry, you may see a similar set of six pairs of characters. Simply replace these characters with the ones you obtained in step 2 and hit the OK button.

Once you’ve entered the proper MAC address in your router, you should be able to use it as a normal router and attach many PCs to the LAN side of the router.