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Comment by ableal | Hacker News Reader

> many residential users have provider-provided hardware

Yep. Even if I bothered to find a replacement for my combination cable modem/router, I don't know if the ISP / cable company would "talk" to the new hardware. Probably not contractually required to do so.

I'm reminded of the liberation of phone handsets from the phone company - up until the 1980s, most everywhere, it used to be that one could only connect to the network a phone leased from the carrier.

The issue of who controls (has root) on all the computers we supposedly own, starting with internet access routers and going on to printers, smart-phones, e-book readers, game consoles, disc players and TVs, is a vexing one.

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> Even if I bothered to find a replacement for my combination cable modem/router, I don't know if the ISP / cable company would "talk" to the new hardware. Probably not contractually required to do so.

You plug the vendor provided hardware into your hardware.

> I don't know if the ISP / cable company would "talk" to the new hardware

I honestly, no-ulterior-motive wonder how often this happens. I mean, isn't ADSL governed by real-world written-down standards? Isn't DOCSIS an actual standard? If so, and given the absolute standardization of things like ARP, RARP, DHCP, and so on, where could the problem possibly come in? Do they scan routers and refuse to talk to ones that don't respond with the right software version numbers?

A piece of anecdata:

I've got comcast, and I recently bought my own cable modem because the provider given one was dropping packets.

To get it to connect at all, I needed to call them up and tell them the model number and the the MAC address (or something that seemed analogous) of the router. I had two models to choose from (fewer than usual because I needed DOCSIS 3 I think), and they made it very clear that these were the only models they would allow you to use.

(it almost goes without saying, despite using their business support, it took three or four days, most of which I was without usable internet)

I started Comcast service about a year ago. They have a page of approved hardware on the web, and I bought a new modem off of that page. It seemed there was plenty of choice even then.

I happened to pick a Motorola SB6150. What surprised me was that there was not a shred of technical information or any management screen. After the cable was installed in my house, my brand new modem was attached to the cable infrastructure and then downloaded Comcast firmware for about twenty minutes. After my modem had completely joined the Borg, only then was it allowed to offer me internet service. Sigh...

sadly, that is DOCSIS. You get to see very little (some modems provide signal levels, some debug info, etc) if anything at all. Everything else comes from/is controlled by the CMTS. Even in the enterprise grade modems like cisco hwic's, the docsis portion is almost entirely hidden from you.

I had the same experience. I have comcast and I bought a Motorola SB6121 on amazon because it was $85 and comcast charges you $7/mo to rent a cablemodem so you save money after only one year. Anyway, I plugged the modem in, it downloaded some config, rebooted, and started talking to comcast. It was pretty painless. And I just picked the cheapest docsis 3 modem off a list of probably 25 approved models.

I, on the other hand, hand a completely different experience with my provider (Mediacom). Their rules (at the time - about 5 years ago) seem to be:

1. We do DOCSIS 2.0, be aware. 2. We will not support your third party modem (i.e. if it doesn't work on our network, there's nothing we'll do about it) 3. We do access control, and service level determination based on MAC. Fill out the silly web form with your account number and CM MAC.

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