Motorola Introduces Home Cable Modem/Router

Anonymous Coward writes: "Check this out! Motorola has a cable modem that also supports Ethernet, USB AND HomePNA! The modem doubles as a NAT, firewall and dhcp server -- Awesome!" Cable modems aren't new, but it seems that both service providers and manufacturers are finally catching the idea that TOS agreements are not about to head off the wave of home networking. Products like this will make the idea of households paying per-connection fees even more laughable.

"safe configuration defaults"

Hopefully motorola will ship these with
no system-wide default (or easily guessable)
passwords, and with spoofing protection outbound.

The trend toward faster and faster network
connections sold as "appliances" puts a lot more
responsibility on the manufacturer to make sure
default configurations are suitable for users,
and won't contribute to DDoS, etc.

Re:Sweeet

It generally works with any Cable modem or DSL service that connects to a PC via Ethernet. LinkSys also makes one of these, and you can find information here. [linksys.com] It includes a 4 port switch, NAT, firewall, etc.

I do installations for a local Cable Modem company here, and we've been playing with the LinkSys model for the past few days. They run around $200US and work pretty well.

Basically, it has one 10BaseT port to connect to the Internet Service (Cable Modem or DSL) and 4 ports to connect to the computers on the Local network. Setup is almost nil, and performance is impressive.

I have a feeling we'll see more companies making these very soon.

Integrated solution == Less freedom

If service vender provide NAT/Firewall box with service as an integrated portion of DSL/Cable connection box, they can block connection to some port claiming to protect consumer by preconfiguring these box.

Result will be no server function accesible from outside. No more personal web server, ssh into your home machine, etc.

I would rather my Linux do those functions in my way.

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TOD Agreements

They also make you say you won't hook up a second TV without paying for it in those terms-of-service agreements. That's insane. They're providing a signal. I say what you do with that signal is your business as long as you don't sell or share it with a household that isn't paying for it. Would they have me pay extra if a friend of mine comes over to watch TV? He's not paying for it, but he's watching it.

There's some more money to be made! Don't worry about pissing off your customers. Just shake 'em down for some more dough.

Same thing with internet access. You're paying for a pipeline through which you can move data. You only get so much bandwidth. Whose business is it what you do with that bandwidth; whether one machine uses it, or if its split between two, or three, or fifty machines.

If the cable companies had any kind of sense at all, they would be trying to cater to our needs as much as possible. High-bandwidth access is going to be a very, very, very big business, and they should try to garner a loyal following, rather than annoying and extorting customers.

Nice Product, now what?

While this appears to be a nice product on the surface a number of issues remain both with the modem/router and with cable i-net access. As already mentioned if the nat's ports are non user configurable then what good is the nat to an advanced user? Particularly if it blocks functionality that some of us would prefer to have. The other major issue is cable access itself. A standard cable modem runs to a node which usually consists of a t1. In theory that node serves 10 customers who all have good bandwidth. A number of issues crop up here. A t1 costs approx 600-1000 a month, less for the isp, each cable user pays around 40-50 a month, which means that cable access on the surface means they are operating at a loss on a month to month basis. This means that to break a profit they need to overload their nodes which really hurts the user's access. Since the nodes run on an atm cloud style system, if one node gets overloaded and traffic spreads to other nodes, you can overload a whole network of these things. A buddy of mine was pinging 3000 minimum outside his node as a result of a total clusterfsck of his area. As if @home gives a damn, they just kept pullin in more customers. Back to topic, a nice modem cant fix the isps load issues, cable is still insecure and the bandwidth aint guaranteed, a fancy nat and router cant fix that.

Re:Cable Modem/Router = DDoS increase?

I'm the engineer who wrote the HPNA
driver for this box. The way it work is... the
user is not expected to do anything to configure
it. Configuration is done by the cable operator
through SNMP.

This is quite a cool product, if I do say so myself.
The NAT and DHCP can be turned off, if necessary, so that the cable company can sell
stuff as an add-on if they so choose.

The advantage of this hub is that it does away
with the necessity to string a coax cable from
the cable modem (which usually sits near the TV
in the living room) to the computer (which usually
sits in the bedroom, upstairs etc.) Now, the cable
guy can merely plug the cable modem into the
nearest phone jack in the living room, plug
the computers' HPNA card into the nearest
phone jack and bingo! instant home network.

A lot of vendors have PCI HPNA cards. I believe
linux drivers are being worked on as well.

Also, HPNA uses a different frequency range
from G.Lite, so you could potentially have
ADSL and HPNA signals on the same phone
network.

BTW, we have also a USB version of this
hub, and a wireless version is on the way!
We are also planning to build many more
cool features into this box that I cannot
talk about right now.

Hari. ([e-mail])

Freedom of Use

I guess the discussion is coming to a point whether we are no longer discussing Motorola's product, as stated in the article itself, but to the option the user does to the service being provided to him. You see, it's pretty much like somebody else told in the main thread: we are paying for the signal. What scares me is when we have money talking louder than quality of service. When we talk about high-speed connections, we want freedom too. I mean, what if I just connect a DSL machine to another machine thru another ethernet card and don't let it get nothing from the Internet, but still be able to get files I got from the Internet with that machine? Will that bypass the ToS? I guess so. It's time to stop with stupid commercial contracts obligating you to not do what you want to with things you've already paid for. I have heard true rumors that the new Brazilian DSL company named Speedy [speedy.com.br] is limiting the number of TCP connections you can make at the same time! What is that? The same thing about a Cable Modem ISP, called Virtua [virtua.com.br], which is charging for bandwidth (you get 1GB/MONTH with the standard access plan). Come on, give us a break.
--
Carlos Laviola

cool, but some people need more

I have a cable modem and a local network, with three user nodes. This new modem would be great for a simple shared connection, but what if I want more? I want an IMAP mail server so that I can get saved mail from any of the three computers. I want an http server to use netscape roaming access, so I can get my bookmarks and preferences anywhere. I want a samba server to keep documents centralized and make backups easy. I want port forwarding to make servers on internal nodes visible.

All those features make home network much easier for the users (just ask my parents :) ), but you can't do any of that with this simple modem. You need a server. Load linux on it, enable ip masquerading, named, and then configure to taste. I admit that most people wouldn't be able to set up all these features. My setup is not for everyone. I just don't want people to think this is the ultimate tool for a home network. Also, I'm predicting that people are going to want far more bandwidth than HomePNA can ever provide. I mean 100BaseT, for decent quality video between two points. If you do it yourself, with NICs, cat5, and a switch (yes, a switch. they're amazingly cheap these days, so buy one.), you'll have much more room for expansion in the future.

In case you're wondering, my server is a $100 compaq from onsale.com. It's running RH6.1. No keyboard, mouse, or monitor. I get mail for all four family members with fetchmail, and serve it with imapd. It's a nice combination, and very easy to set up. All three clients run netscape mail under various windows versions. Roaming access for netscape is possible with some creative tweaks to apache. It's a _very_ nice feature. Use it. Other services: sendmail (for fetchmail and mailman mailing lists), apache, ssh, samba, ftp. If you're smart, you'll run a dhcp server too.

Re:Cablemodems

Well, every Internet connection is a shared connection; the fact that cable modems share a local loop as well as an upstream connection is pretty irrelevant. The cable company can build a bottleneck in the local loop, or they can build it in their routers. It's just a case of where they decide to spend their money.

I used MediaOne when I lived in Massachusetts, and was pretty impressed the way they handled it. They used DHCP, which allowed them to limit the number of modems sharing a loop. But even during the fast growth, you only got renumbered two or three times a year. You could choose your own host name, you could run servers with 384K upstream bandwidth. People would get somebody to host DNS, and they'd run web servers, mail servers, ftp, private NNTP servers, just about everything, and with MediaOne's full blessing.

And when you think about it, why is upstream bandwidth any different than downstream? Everything that goes out of a server has to go into a computer somewhere else. Connections have two ends, the bandwidth is no more precious on one end than the other.