Need to understand if user/password/phone number all needed to login?

[MikeT]

Sounds strange, lets just go for the theory if you can help me understand the way it works.

Say I have a "friend" with a fibre fttc socket at home, he does have a paid up account with an isp for that phone number.

I assumed that the password/username and phone number all had to be correct for the fibre account to work? is this so?

Is it possible that plugging a modem in with those account details at another phone number at a different property will still work?

Are the cards in the local exchange just allowing a handshake to be attempted on an isp only level?

So say the friend has a talktalk id and username will the modemrouter setup for him try to handshake only with talktalk gear searching until it finds the id and user in its banks and disregards the originating phone number?

So in a nutshell, is it possible for the wrong user/password at the wrong phone number to train up and provide a service if the modem was preconfigured for a n other at another address phone number?

[nowster]

Usually your line is locked to your ISP. Your ISP then determines what (if any) authentication is needed. For example, BT uses a single login/password for all their users.

[MikeT]

Yes line locked to isp is what I would expect, but I wonder how many have actually tried to test if this is true.

I have now tried 2 different ISP's separate fibre enabled lines using a 3rd user/pass enabled modem for a totally different isp and on both occasions I was able to get logged in and use the service of the 3rd party isp.

You dont really gain anything apart from having a more flexible service, but its strange this can happen at all.

[MisterW]

I'm not sure, but I believe that with WBC (Wholesale broadband connect) the authentication now happens on the BTw kit. It used to be that, as nowster said, the BTw kit was configured to route a line to an ISP and then that ISP authenticated. Now I think the authentication is done at BTw (by contacting the ISP Radius servers I think!) and then the connection is routed to the ISP.