Would be interested where that happens because I've never encountered something like this (binding the mac to the access) in public networks e.g. McDonald's, hotels and other shops. I did only get access codes which could be used for a specific time where I just changed my mac address.

I only know about mac whitelisting in protected networks managed by wary administrators.

In Canada, the ISP shaw offers ShawOpen for subscribers. There are hotspots all over the place, access control by MAC address. So I would need to provide a consistent MAC address to that SSID.

Airports do this all the time: Wifi is free for 1 hour, after that it's $X/hour. It's simply putting a "timer" on the MAC address.

Then randomizing that address gives you a new hour every time.

Yes, tested and working for 10+ years now. Also works well if usage is capped/throttled after a certain amount and you wish to 'reset' the connection. Try not to abuse this on a shared network obviously, but if you have a legitimate need it's very simple.

All of the universities I attended used MAC address whitelisting.

> I only know about mac whitelisting in protected networks managed by wary administrators.

Wouldn't make any sense for properly securing a network. As an attacker you could just create an evil twin (same ESSID), let some students connect to it and just use their mac addresses (and even drop their connections when they try to use the university wifi).

Edit: You don't even necessarily need an evil twin to get their mac addresses. You only have to listen to the wifi traffic and get some - even encrypted data packets still contain the raw mac address as far as I know. airodump-ng is the perfect tool to do that.

I didn't say it made any sense :) This is how I was able to get my Playstation connected up in my dorm. I set my laptop's MAC to my Playstation's, then got my laptop authenticated using their tool, switched the MAC back, and the Playstation would connect up without issue.