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Originally Posted by Mauldor
Why do they even supply modems at all? What is wrong with Buying them online and you choosing what to buy, how much to pay and so forth. ADSL ISP normally give you Free some crappy modem but at least you can buy a router / modem to suit your needs. This would then stop them having to PAY people to collect them when people terminate the account and so forth. I am sure there is a reason why they supply them and not sell them and maybe even then people would complain that they bought Modem XXX and now it wont get the full speed yet people who bought Older Routers with 10mbit ports seem happy enough to go and buy a new one.
One the things that is pretty standard in IT:
Everything gets Better, cheaper as time goes on - This also Includes the Equipment NTL Use to supply the connection (that 5K card that was mentioned).
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To avoid loads of support calls from people who bought dodgy ebay modems, and for security reasons (no username and password on UK cable networks, authorisation is done based on MAC address).
To allow people to use any modem means having to run PPPoE a la AOL over cable modem.
They don't collect the SACMs anyway, not really worth it for a few quid of hardware.
EDIT: Time for a part 4 pls moderation chaps.
EDIT2: That 5k price is a substantial discount on the list price, and a bulk price - these cards will of course be cheaper in the future however ntl likely bought a huge amount of cards in bulk to obtain that price - the single unit cost you're talking over twice that. In short it still isn't feasible to have enough bandwidth available to guarantee 2Mbit to every customer on a cable area so pretty please don't worry yourself about exact contention ratio and planning
Also things get better yes, but cable is a bit different on that score, DOCSIS 2 line cards go down in price because DOCSIS 3 line cards are made to replace them in the market and cost more than the DOCSIS 2 cards do at present to sting the early adopters a bit.