I was surprised the other day when I got up at 05:30-ish to see what seemed to be an unmarked (no uniform, etc) cable guy leaving the vicinity of the large green cable box in my yard. When I powered up my main computer I checked my router logs (for some reason I actually do NOT remember why!) and found that my router had "lost its lease" and been reassigned a cablemodem-supplied IP address - 192.168.100.10 - rather than a wider WAN-DHCP-supplied one after the cablemodem had been rebooted due to a "timeout" error around this time (IOW, the cableguy had discoed my cable outside, causing a chain of things to happen to my cablemodem and router). That IP assignment, however, only lasted, like, a half hour before the cablemodem had rebooted again properly connected to COX and passing through a proper local Cox IP address for my house. Then the next day it appeared, around the same morning time, that a cableguy (didn't see person but different personal car involved) had been inside the box again but no apparent changes made.
Inside the box my cable was laying on top of the large finned gray box (that does whatever it does for all the houses served by that green cable box) in a different position but nothing else different than the day before. The cable had a large metal filter inline (looked recent) - doing a Google image search for something like "Cox large metal filter on cable" (!) resulted in a bunch of images that looked like the one inside the box - all MoCA filters. These are supposed to stop something inside my house from getting distributed to my neighbors. Or maybe vice-versa. As far as I could see our cable was the only one with this (apparent) filter.
Anyway, that's the background info. My Cox cable goes from that box to the distribution point on the side of my house, then connected inside to ONLY a cablemodem. The cable itself, via too many splitters, probably has live open-ended outlets in numerous places inside my house from the historical installation and use of cable TV, however we have no TV or TV-like connections to that cable - only the one cablemodem connection - all other internet connections are done via the router to the cablemodem, mostly wireless but ALL via the single router-cablemodem connection.
So...questions - is this large metal filter in place to stop me from interfering with neighbors? And why since we have no internal cable connectivity other than to a cablemodem? Could the unconnected-but-"live" splitter outlets be generating something weird that Cox didn't want getting out? If so, is that possibly affecting our cablemodem connectivity to Cox that =I= would want to try to handle (I could go around the house finding all splitters and removing them - just don't particularly want to do that unless necessary).
Or is this filter just a cable-TV-frequency filter to prevent cable-TV theft? (that is fine with me since we don't use cable-tv at all - our TVs have NO hardwired connections to anything, getting ALL their content via wireless digital connections to the router).
Any knowledgable folks out there please respond.
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