Spectrum internet setup is pretty straightforward these days. You order it, a box arrives with a modem (and router if you want Spectrum’s wifi option) you follow a few steps, and you are done. Pretty easy right? As it turns out, however, there are a few tricks and issues that may cause some frustration with the setup. One example is if you connect your computer to the modem and activate it and later want to add a router. In that scenario, things do not work straightforward at all. The worst part is that Spectrum support would not help and would consistently guide you to your router manufacturer support.

No router scenario

If you do not want/need a router then your setup steps are very straight forward and simply watching Spectrum’s video should get you set up. It goes step by step. You connect your modem to the cable. Connect your computer to the modem. Activate your modem and you should be good to go.

Router setup

The important step here is to make sure you activate your model only after you have connected your router to it and your computer to the router. If that is how you activated your model all should be fine and working. The way Spectrum makes the setup easy and secure is to remember your computer mac address

The mistake many people do is to connect the computer to the modem first. Activate the modem and make sure there is a working internet connection. Then adding the router to this setup should just work, right? Well not exactly. What happens is the modem records the computer mac address and from that point on it gets tricky to make it work with a router. Unless your router can do a mac clone.

Mac Clone

In our case, the router was added after the modem was activated with a computer connected to it. So the mac address of the computer was stored. The initial idea we had was we would set up the router with a static IP (which we got from our computer) and then have the modem as the gateway. That worked until Spectrum issued a new IP to us which was expected since we did not order static IP from them. They can change the IP anytime they want.

So how can you trick the modem to think that the computer that activated the service is the router? Here is where the mac clone functionality of the router comes into play. The router now “acts” as the computer with which you activated the service and you can still have your automatic IP setup as expected. Just click on the Mac Clone button and leave the WAN Connection type to “Automatic IP”.

Our router was Asus RT-AC68W but most if not all recent Asus routers have the mac clone capability. Other router manufacturers have that functionality as well. If you know how to get to your router user interface that should all you need to do.

To get to the router user interface you have to either connect a LAN cable to it and your computer. If it is a wifi router you can join the wifi network it creates. Then with your browser go to 192.168.0.1 or 192.168.1.1. Those are the usual default addresses manufacturers use. You should follow the manufacturer manual/documentation as to how to log in and get to the WAN settings.