I’m trying to debug a long-standing (2.5 year!) problem with our Cox Communications service. The symptoms are:

• The video service has blocking, and even an occasional audio pause. This happens frequently, around 1-5 times in a 2 hour period.
• The phone service cuts out for short times, perhaps 1-2 seconds. This happens rarely.
• The internet service drops packets, or only one-way flow of packets seem to to happen. This is hard to detect and diagnose.

Since the video side has the most problems, each of which was recorded on my TiVo, it became the best option to debug.

However, this means I cannot use my TiVo, as Cox suspects it is at fault. Thus, I am downgraded to live TV. Let me tell you, this sucks. I keep on reaching for the remote, hoping it will skip these commercials. Unfortunately, I’m once again in a very comfortable cage, and stuck watching them – not the last of which is that with 12 minutes of commercials in a one hour show, it’s very likely the video blocking will occur during one of these ads.

Well, ok, perhaps not entirely… yet.

This is actually a rant on something cable modems allow your cable internet provider to do to you.

They restrict access to your own hardware.

Why would they do this? Paranoia. A while back, there was a security hole in a network monitoring tool called Simple Network Management Protocol, or SNMP. This security issue allowed people to crash other people’s modems, break into their own and change upload/download speeds, and other nasty things.

All of these have been fixed. However, people are still breaking into their modems to “uncap” them – change speed settings. They just don’t use SNMP to do it anymore. They’ve become more advanced and use things like internal serial ports or JTAG ports.

So, why do cable companies still restrict access to SNMP, and worse, to some of your modem’s diagnostic features? I suspect it is because they don’t want to have to answer questions about why they suck. They hide the real details of what your modem is doing from you.

Why is this a big deal?

For one, I own the hardware, but my cable company configures it against my wishes. I can understand rate limiting – I pay for the fastest service already – but I cannot understand restricting diagnostic tools.

For two, I have spent, in the last 6 months, perhaps 40 hours debugging a cable internet issue with techs from Cox Communications. After many, many rounds of techs who report “all signal levels are good” I finally got a real live network engineer on the line, who, in 5 minutes, could look at all the statistics on my modem. And solve problems.