Can my college tell if I have a router?

[Fallen Angel]

All providers use a similar tool. How else are we supposed to troubleshoot the modem and line signal over the phone with a customer without such a tool?

For example, say a customer calls up and says they cannot connect. If it's a nic/usb issue, my modem tool tells me that right away. If the server is down, the modem tool tells me right away. If an account is locked down .. etc. You get the point.
In a company that gets paid on call volume, having such tools expedites the process for the customer, keeps our company growing and ourselves employed.

If you were to phone in with no connection, would you rather have the tech be able to say "There's an outage in your area" or would you rather walk through the DHCP server steps which takes about 20 minutes?

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

I will inquire if this tool is being can be used by my ISP, as most of my family works high up in it.

I highly doubt it would not be able to control one of my modem's due to their simple nature.

I also see that your modem is assigned an IP, making it more than a simple modem, because it is now doing routing functions

 

[doC47]

They don't care. My friends play Xbox Live and have a computer hooked up at the same time. They pay the same price for all the connections. There is a huge hub in their system that spits about a 1000 ethernets. The connection isnt that good in colleges.

 

[urf]

Fallen Angel - So, the only identifying feature the tools uses is the MAC address. Using the first 3 hex digits it identifies the vendor and model of the device. With this in mind, if you have a router that provides a MAC cloning/spoofing facility, as many do these days and you tell if to clone the MAC of one of your PCs on your LAN, the tool wont automatically identify the device as a router.

As previously mentioned, closer investigation could identify it as a routing device...but to be frank all info that is used to remote fingerprint a device is editable.

Soooo, back to the original question in this thread - your ISP wont know if you don't want them to know. Plug your router in with no canges to the configuration and they'll spot it straight off, as Fallen has shown us.

As for ISP's that have tools like Fallen screen shot'ed - they are perfectly within their rights. If you read the T&C's for your agreement with your ISP it is quite likely there'll be something about them owning the modem they've provided you with. Hence, they can do whatever they like with it. Now if you've plugged your own modem in, it may be another story (I'm not a lawyer, it's academic anyway). And TBH, if my ISP couldn't troubleshoot the connection like that I'd be pretty unimpressed.

So, we're safe