I run a local DNS server on my network – and had made the decision to move away from Mediacom’s DNS servers as my forwarders after testing the speed of theirs in relation to the alternatives.  I am in NO WAY directing my traffic toward the Mediacom DNS servers.  This left me quite confused when I received a Mediacom re-direction page this week after typing a URL incorrectly.  I hopped onto DSLReports and got the scoop.  I found Mediacom has initiated a campaign to increase advertising revenue by automatically redirecting clients to their ad-based redirection site.  The big problem I have with this is – they are completing this by means of deep packet inspection vs. re-directing through their internal DNS servers.  This means it takes precendence over my valid DNS response from an alternative DNS server.

DSLReports stated that opt-out is possible – though it’s also been reported to magically re-enable on occasion.  Follow this link for the opt-out option.

After 20 minutes on hold with Mediacom support, as is usual, customer support gave the same script about the ‘opt-out page’ and the directions to follow.  He stated there is no way for them to verify (as the support offices) who has opted-out, and additionally informed me that it was tracked by the customer’s modem MAC address.

Unfortunately, for us Mediacom subscribers, we are at the mercy of Mediacom to ensure  the opt-out is working correctly.  This post’s purpose is little more than to rant about my own experience – but I hope that it can at least bring some additional attention to these obnoxious, and shady actions by Mediacom in recent months.

So, after searching around on DSL Reports I found that you could actually change the view permissions pretty easily.  Thought I would take the liberty of posting it here for others interested:

Navigate to http://192.168.100.1/_aslvl.asp 192.168.100.1 is the default for this modem.  It could be different for others, but there wouldn’t be a reason your ISP would change this before giving it to you.

You will be prompted for login here.  Type in the credentials listed below:

User: admin

Password: W2402

At this point you can change the access level to the highest from the drop down menu.  After pressing Save you should receive an “update successful” page.

Just head back to http://192.168.100.1/ now and you should have full access to all menus.  I found this quite helpful.  Additionally, I found it interesting that I could now view all of the configuration file contents from my ISP by going to Advanced > Config and looking under the CM Configuration file.  This is the file that is pushed to the modem from your ISP.  Along with all of the SNMP, QOS, and TFTP information, it included the information regarding my bandwidth caps from the ISP.  I assume you could change the configuration file, send it via tftp to your modem, and change the default tftp server so that it would redirect to your local tftp server for the edited configuration file versus the ISP’s.  This, I believe would allow you to remove bandwidth caps your ISP puts in place for your connection.  However, I didn’t even attempt this because I have no idea what measures my ISP puts in place to track that the speeds you are receiving do not match what you have listed on your account.  I am satisfied with my ISP and don’t wish to get kicked off by editing the config.  I suggest others who want to keep their service do the same and let sleeping dogs lie.

I’m going to work on setting up Freeswitch soon and found the information regarding my VOIP carrier quite useful, and should save me a call to my ISP to get those access addresses.  Hopefully this is useful for others as well, thank for reading.