[ale] Comcast cable modem - incompatible?

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Tue, 2010-10-05 at 07:45 -0400, jcpilman at gmail.com wrote:
> A quick look at the first few google hits for DOCSIS says that all
> four versions are fully forward and backward compatible.

If this were the case, DOCSIS 1 devices would still be alive on the
Comcast network; however, they required their own devices on the “server
side” and Comcast has stopped supporting them, so that would be an
inaccurate statement unless you're saying different from what I think
you're saying.

DOCSIS 3 and later versions of DOCSIS 2 hardware are capable of using
IPv6 for configuration and management.  Earlier DOCSIS 2 and pre-DOCSIS
2 hardware (for obvious reasons) cannot use IPv6.  I'm going to wager
the guess that Comcast wants to move to IPv6 for everything internally
facing; they're also working on IPv6 for Internet connectivity.  They
are also at some point going to be updating all their STBs to add IPv6
functionality and connectivity, because they're running out of IPv4
RFC1918 address space on their internal network.

	--- Mike