MAC address

Why does my new cable company want my MAC address in order to  sign up for a cable modem?

Company=TVMax=Shittyness

If it is anything like Time Warner, they use the MAC ID of the cable modem to assign services in their billing system, which in turn is tied to their provisioning system. The way Time Warner works is with the DOCSIS standard, when a cable modem is hooked up to their plant and requests information from its servers, the servers respond by assigning a "disabled" configuration file to the modem until the modem is added into their provisioning system and then can be assiged services for insance speed/class of service/etc... Its basically the simple way of stopping the mythical "uncapped" cable modem, only way to get around is to clone the MAC of another modem already on the system, and then you get thier speeds, not any faster than normal. Also when both  the real cable modem and the cloned one are online at the same time, they will both cease working.