Get Your MAC Address and Set Up Your Xbox One

OK, you got your Xbox One; maybe you waited at Best Buy all night to pick it up, but now you’re back at your college dorm and you have a problem. In order to connect your Xbox One to the Internet, you must have the MAC address. 

First thing’s first. What is a MAC address? 

You can have a MAC address even though the Xbox One is not an Apple product. MAC is short for media access control address and is the unique identifier to connect your device to the network. A lot of universities use them to make sure that you’re actually a student on campus and to track you down if you commit an infraction on their network. Just something to keep in mind. 

I know what a MAC address is. How do I get it? 

OK, set up your Xbox One like you normally would, let the set up fail and then use the troubleshooter. It’ll show you the MAC address. 

What you’re looking for will say “Set Up Network.” Redditor Chicago31 explained it best here: 

For anyone wondering, mess around with the setting up a network options. The menus are all similar but different, so fail a test and try to find anything about changing network settings or setting up a network. I went to set up a network, gave it a one character name, failed a test, and then the screen gave me my MAC address.

All of this will happen before the update (cause the update is coming from the Internet you cannot connect to. 

Still not working…Now what? 

Unfortunately this has now fallen into the realm of your university’s IT department. Some colleges and universities do things a bit differently and you may have to contact them so they can manually authorize your device. 

This could be because your university is overly protective, or just doesn’t recognize consoles out of the box. It could take a couple of days for the university to whitelist consoles. 

Also, it is day 1, so keep that in mind. Servers are going to be super busy today, especially with the release update and people contacting for technical issues. 

Did this answer your questions? Ask for more clarification in the comments below.