Skie what I remember from when I could use the other channel was if I left the superhub to its own devices, then 9 times out of 10 it would pick the higher utilised channel. If it was a completely random logic then it would be roughly 50% chance of getting either channel. The only time I seen the lower channel was when I emulated fault conditions. The very first time I got on it was after a long outage, then the other times was when I either did a lot of power cycles 20+ or after deliberatly reducing the SNR by half removing the cable. So if anything it appeared to be used as a fallback channel.
Then a change to docsis2 occured and I eventually got the vmng300. Since utilisation remained fairly low I stopped bothering trying to jump channels and I also wrongly thought I stayed on it anyway by the channel id been 7 on the vmng300. Now utilisation is going up again my curioisity is back. However.
1 - is the channel even there anymore it may have been merged into the larger docsis2 channel.
2 - if its there is it still available to use to my modem as VM may have made it unavailable to me.
I will try later to see if I can change channels but wont try forever
maybe for 20 minutes or so.