Future of Customer-owned Cable Modems: Looking Dire?

ViRGE · 2025-06-27T03:12:21+00:00

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?

CommunityMember

hex0101 Of course no one knows 100% how much of the total price goes towards equipment.

Comcast explicitly shows a price for their x10 service equipment monthly costs. Looking at the numbers, they had large alignment with (what I believe to be) Comcast’s real fees for maintenance and support fees from the manufactures for the equipment (although not the total CAPEX). If you have access to the manufacturers U&C prices for their ONT/CPE equipment (and all manufacturers have a somewhat equivalent fee structure), you can estimate what those operators send to those manufacturers year over year, and only a fool imagines that those fees are not included in the prices that consumers pay.

edwardp

lesmikesell

You have to switch to the new plans.

This is the issue I have WRT changing plans. I have internet and landline phone with them. I had to go through Retentions to obtain this, when I decided to switch to the Flex boxes and remove the Cable TV plan to save money. The local store said back then that I could not have Flex boxes with the landline phone. That’s where Retentions came into play.

The bill shows I’m on the (now grandfathered) Blast internet plan (currently 800/175) with the $15.00 monthly rental added, plus the landline phone plan.

I’m not interested in gigabit service, nor do I want it.

lesmikesell

edwardp This is the issue I have WRT changing plans. I have internet and landline phone with them

I moved my landline number to the T-mobile ‘digits’ service to separate it from my internet service just for that reason. Don’t recommend the digits service, but there are other choices. I just wanted to keep the number that I’ve given out for decades, but the people I want to talk to have my cell number anyway. Going to Google Voice would have been better but you have to port to a cell number first. I thought I’d be able to do that from the digits service but it turns out not to work and I’ve been too lazy to change it again.

Anyway, at the moment I’m on a $70/mo 400Mbs plan that includes the gateway and unlimited data with a 5 year price lock - and they sent me a free wifi extender pod. Not as good as some deals I’ve seen but better than before.

bigcoda

Lol, I guess Hitron is trying charge you $70 more for the black version, of the same modem they normally sell in white for $139. I don’t see any other differences in appearance or specs between the two? $70 more for the same modem in a different color, seems pretty steep?

Man-of-Leisure

bigcoda Are those prices set by them? Often Amazon re-sellers will inflate prices for no real reason at all. I try to only buy “Shipped from and sold by Amazon”

httv97

hex0101

Doesn’t Comcast notoriously gatekeep/slow-walk the firmware approval update process for OEMs?

bigcoda

Man-of-Leisure Are those prices set by them? Often Amazon re-sellers will inflate prices for no real reason at all. I try to only buy “Shipped from and sold by Amazon”

Yes the prices are set by Hitron. Ships from Amazon, sold by Hitron Americas. Hitron has aways claimed the regular price for the white version is $209. But they always have the regular price listed at $139, and even lower one on sale. Lol, I guess Hitron thinks there are people out there willing to pay $70 more for a different color modem.

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