When Wireless LAN is better than a wired NIC! Does an ISP know if aconnection is wired or wireless?

May not be using my acronyms correctly, but in rural Philippines my ISP ("Bayan"), on a paid connection (not pirated as some / many are here), gives me only less than 1 Mbps when I pay for three. But the real annoyance is that the wired port on the modem/router only works sporadically, and while it's possible it's a hardware problem on the unit itself (though I somewhat doubt it, as every port of the four they have gives similar problems), I tried to no avail to buy a NIC wired card (which worked fine for a while then started giving the same problem), and finally, out of desperation, since my wireless links are working fine, I bought a PCI wireless card by TP-Link and it works fine. No more yellow icon no internet symbol on Windows 8. I have no explanation for it except either the modem router is bad (logically this must be true, but my intuition tells me it's not that straightforward), or, perhaps Bayan can sense if a connection is wired or wireless, and adjust accordingly? Maybe the Bayan ISP does not like wired connections due to piracy concerns (that is, they detect a wired connection and cut it off, under the theory the user may be supplying a neighbor with internet, which Bayan does not like as it loses them money).

Can an ISP detect if a connection at the access point (the modem/router) is wired or wireless?

Paul?

RL

RayLopez99 wrote:
May not be using my acronyms correctly, but in rural Philippines my ISP ("Bayan"), on a paid connection (not pirated as some / many are here), gives me only less than 1 Mbps when I pay for three. But the real annoyance is that the wired port on the modem/router only works sporadically, and while it's possible it's a hardware problem on the unit itself (though I somewhat doubt it, as every port of the four they have gives similar problems), I tried to no avail to buy a NIC wired card (which worked fine for a while then started giving the same problem), and finally, out of desperation, since my wireless links are working fine, I bought a PCI wireless card by TP-Link and it works fine. No more yellow icon no internet symbol on Windows 8. I have no explanation for it except either the modem router is bad (logically this must be true, but my intuition tells me it's not that straightforward), or, perhaps Bayan can sense if a connection is wired or wireless, and adjust accordin
gly? Maybe the Bayan ISP does not like wired connections due to piracy concerns (that is, they detect a wired connection and cut it off, under the theory the user may be supplying a neighbor with internet, which Bayan does not like as it loses them money).

Can an ISP detect if a connection at the access point (the modem/router) is wired or wireless?

Paul?

RL

No, they don't reach through the modem and do stuff.

On some telco-grade ADSL equipment, they can push out
a firmware update, to keep the ADSL equipment secure from
the WAN site. So kiddies don't tip over your modem. My first
ISP really really needed that, because the ADSL modem
provided as a rental, was known to be insecure.

My current modem is owned by me, and nobody pushes
firmware to it. And I'm on a different ISP.

If they wanted, the telco could "guess" at how many
computers are connected, by doing traffic analysis.
But they could easily get the wrong answer doing that.
This does not include the ability to "guess at Wifi".
On the public side of the WAN router, all they see
is the public address. The IP addresses used by your
individual computers, are not exposed at the packet
level. Only if some software is stupid enough to report
a LAN address using some web code, might the
ISP determine 192.168.3.3 is your IP address.
And that still doesn't tell them whether 192.168.3.3
is on a wired LAN or a wireless path.

Paul