With all of the hoopla over today’s major changes to Comcast’s bread & butter Internet service plans, I wanted to break out a separate discussion on the future of cable modems.
In short, am I off base in thinking that, with these latest changes, Comcast has all but killed the future of customer-owned modems?
For the last 25 years, owning your own modem has been the way to get around paying Comcast’s increasingly absurd fees for renting one of their gateway modems. As well as getting your hands on a better modem than some of the devices that Comcast has offered in years past.
But now that Comcast has stopped charging for modem rentals - or let’s be pragmatic here: baked it into the cost of service so that everyone has to pay for a rental, whether they use it or not - it seems like Comcast has killed the major economic incentive to own your own modem.
Since you’re no longer saving money by renting, buying your own modem is now an economic liability, costing owners $100-$300 on top of everything else. And since owning your own modem doesn’t get you anything else in terms of speed, the cost benefit of not paying for modem rentals was the defining reason to get one. Even Comcast’s recent XB7/XB8 modem gateways, though still kind of lackluster as routers, are pretty good as bridged modems. Not great, by any means, but probably good enough for most people.
Which, to get to the crux of my thoughts, is ultimately going to lead to the end of customer-owned modems. Even if Comcast continues to support them into the DOCSIS 4.0 era - which is looking unlikely, given the lack of announcements thus far - what’s the incentive for even most technical customers to rent a modem on current D3.1 systems? And if there is no incentive to buy modems, why would Arris and the others continue to even produce consumer modems?
We’ve already seen the customer-owned modem market go into a funk with the recent mid-split changes. Only a handful of modems have been approved, and only one of those modems (CODA56) comes close to qualifying as affordable. So for Comcast to undercut the remaining demand for those modems seems like a sure-fire way to knock the legs out from under the customer-owned modem market for good.
Perhaps I’m just being paranoid here? But am I wrong in thinking that we’re heading for a future where all cable modems on Comcast’s network are going to be rental modems?