Skip to main content

My ISP claims that its service disruption is limited to a couple of events between December, 2022 and January, 2023.  My experience of problems with internet connections is far more frequent than that.

The event log available on the modem’s web page is overwriting more recent events, but there is a persistent error that repeats, in conjunction with other error(4) messages:

"SW upgrade Failed after download - Incompatible SW file"

 

When this happens, my internet connection is lost, and often my Arris Mesh network becomes unavailable as well.  I’ve talked to my ISP technical representatives about this.  They have no interest at all in helping figure what might be going on between the modem and the local whole house wifi.  So much for the event log being important to the ISP.  That might be true if the ISP is supporting this model of modem and renting it out.

Question 1:  If I interpret this event as one where Arris attempted to upgrade the modem software, but the upgrade failed, why would this be a cause for disruption of service?

Question 2: If Arris is attempting to upgrade the modem software, why not provide the notice in advance, and give the user some control over when to allow it, so the user can monitor this?  That would arm the user with more information to feed back to solve the problem.  I have seen this error complaint in other threads and haven’t been impressed with the technical response.

Question 3: Where can I find a description of the errors that might show up in my modem event log?  Why can’t I find a technical response that explains the meaning of the event errors?  Even if the root cause of the error can be multiple and indeterminate, at least the designers of the modem software and hardware know what local conditions would cause the message.

This is a recurring (daily) problem for me.  I work from home and have to VPN in to my company for some applications to work.  If the internet service is getting disrupted frequently, I’m wasting a lot of time rebooting modems and my computer to hopefully reconnect, when I should be working on what my company relies on me to do.

As far as I know, the Cable provider can only update FW on the cable modems.  The manufacture cannot and are not allowed do it.  

 

Do you know if the modem is supported on your Internet plan?  It could cause issues if the modem is not compatible with your Internet plan.

The full view of your logs and the cable connections page helps more than just the one line of it. 

I think it was implied in my problem description that the cable modem belongs to me and not my cable company.  If that is a problem for this new cable company (changed within the last year), then they might have stated flat out that my modem isn’t compatible with their service. I will follow up with them, however. It never occurred to me that a cable modem that is docsis 3.1 compliant would not be compatible with an ISP’s services. 
 

If you are correct about SW/FW updates only made by ISP providers, I will explore that with them as well.  That gives me something to go on regarding questions 1 and 2.
 

I’m not providing a bunch of event log printout because it looks similar to printouts provided by others on other posts. 

I was hoping to receive an answer from an Arris technical representative on these questions. Question 3 still lacks an answer. 
 

Thanks for the help so far. 

there isn’t an easy answer for question 3 as there’s a bunch of different types of errors that you can get. You can read about each here.

https://www.cablelabs.com/specifications/CM-SP-MULPIv3.1?v=I21

 

Or you post them and the people who are familiar can give you a rough heads up of what it means . 

Or not.  No one’s forcing you to but its tough to help off limited info. 

 

This is the community support forum. its mainly members of the public helping out. There are some mods on here but you won’t find the technical engineers on here. 

Terms & ConditionsCookie settings