[mike_d]

> I can only assume they gather data about your home network and sell it to third parties, and don't want to lose that revenue stream

Nah. You are just paying for the privilege of breaking their unified management platform.

As an ISP "power users" break the uniformity that leads to economies of scale in management, and often over-estimate their own abilities leading to increased support costs.

[supertrope]

DOCSIS in practice does not guarantee interoperability. Each ISP has its own supported modems list. Deviating from their blessed hardware means they will not send the special ISP specific firmware that’s bug compatible with their setup. Or they might refuse to activate it. Of course any issues are immediately blamed on customer owned CPE.

Because of this the real point of demarcation is the approved modem/gateway’s Ethernet port not the coaxial junction box.

[alduin32]

So I work mostly with fiber, which is a bit different than DOCSIS in terms of demarcation and interoperability, but at least with fiber, these economies of scale in management can also be realized without having this unified management platform, although it can indeed impact the revenue stream. I work at an ISP where LAN management is an add-on option (that most users take), and so we maintain this uniformity :

- unmanaged clients ("power users") get an ONT that is very easy to monitor remotely, and we never had a situation where they were unable to setup a DHCP client

- managed clients pay a bit more and get an AP/router that they cannot directly configure, except for things like the wifi password and some NAT mappings.

It would not make sense to price it this way if we were selling data about their home network, and I suppose that's part of the reason other big ISPs here prohibit their users from connecting to the ONT directly.

[Buttons840]

How much does it cost to say "sorry, we cannot help you because you're using your own router" like Comcast support does? I can't imagine how that would cost more than them supporting their own router.

[vuln]

100% this.