Good things to know about cable modems

[bconway at alum.wpi.edu (Brian J Conway)]

> How did you determine that AT&T sent the firmware update?

I assumed it was AT&T sending it as part of network maintenance/upgrades.  
I guess I can't conclude fully that it was them, but I do know that only 
the coax interface of the modem listens for such things.

> What does this mean for people who buy their modems at BestBuy and
> don't want auto updates?

You really don't have a choice, the updates are what controls the speeds 
of the modems and the protocol version/method by which they connect to 
AT&T's equipment, and you agree to letting AT&T administer them as part of 
your user agreement.  I read a couple stories recently about people taking 
it upon themselves to "unlock" their modems for 10 Mbps each way (though 
parts of the stories seemed rather fishy, like how they were able to 
upload firmware when the ethernet side of the device doesn't listen for 
transfers), but when they were discovered they were removed from their 
cable providers for the distant future.  AT&T wasn't very forthcoming on 
what this latest update accomplished, so I figured it was just a bug in my 
particuler modem or bad code on their part that made it not work 
correctly with an already-running modem.  Whatever, no real loss.

-b