Surfboard modems
Here in the Midlands fibre to the cabinet was delivered by Diamond Cable, sadly long gone. Then ran a T92 line 40 miles up the A46 to Lincoln. It took them 3 years. They then ran fibre round the town. that took another 5 years. One resident wrote the the local Rag and complained "..now that Diamond Cable have done to Lincolns roads and pavements in two years what the Luftwaffe failed to do in five.."
The first cable modems they supplied were Surfboard modmes. They used a soft config file sucked off the server and stiored in EPROM. The config file set you up/down speed, otherwise all you had was 64k to the server and no other connectuion. It turned out to vbe suprisingly easy to sniff config files as they zoomed past, save them, read them, reset the mac address of the modem, then copy up the config file. You paid for 128k but got 10Mb. The other end couldnt tell there was a a router and a cloned copy, it saw it as one. I learned a lot about cable modems from Diamond Cable........
Biting the hand that feeds IT
