Cable Modems and other home routers

Situation:

Cable modems are a new and growingly popular breed of connection to the internet. They are also largely BeOS ready! There are 2 connection flavors; one that works and one that doesn't. The working one is a bridge/router that connects your wall connection to an ethernet cable requiring no phone line, also known as bi-directional cable access. The one that doesn't is the one that requires both a phone line as well as the cable connection, and is becoming harder to find for obvious reasons.

This also applies to ADSL and ISDN router/bridge/gateway configurations.

Things to try:

As these are ethernet connections with a local router, the BeOS only sees the ethernet connection part of it. All you have to do is use an ethernet card with a BeOS driver and configure the network preference. Many ISPs provide an ethernet card with the connection if you don't already have one, and most are using the 3Com 3c90x or an NE2000 compatible card (inexpensive but BeOS ready).

In nearly all router situations, the router will assign you an address. This is called DHCP. If you happen to have a provider that assigns your addresses, they will give you the settings to include in your software. The things you need are: your address, the router address, the DNS server(s) addresses, and a name for the host box. If you use DHCP, the server provides these automatically every time you log on to the network.

Beyond this, there are now software authenticated cable modem ISPs that require a software client to allow you access to their service. The software authenticated ISPs should supply BeOS software for their service. There are now a few clients for the Road Runner service on BeWare until Road Runner supplies one. They are:
http://www-classic.be.com/beware/Network/rrclient.html
http://www-classic.be.com/beware/Network/RRlogin.html
http://www-classic.be.com/beware/Add-Ons/rrlms.html