Equipment Support > Hardware By Brand > Motorola > SB6141 Firmware Update?

SB6141 Firmware Update?

Comcast is currently pushing SB_KOMODO-1.0.6.8 SCMO1-NOSH to SB6120, SB6121, and SB6141 modems on their network (it makes no difference whether the modem is leased or customer owned).

Until/unless Time Warner decides to push a newer firmware to your modem, you are going to be stuck with what you have. The DOCSIS standard generally does not allow the installation of firmware in a cable modem by the end user; it must be pushed by the ISP over the coax interface.

I have heard of some who have done it on some DOCSIS modems by opening the case and installing a JTAG interface on the modem's circuit board, but that is not a project for everyone. With that method, you would still need to obtain a copy of the firmware, and if your ISP did not support that firmware version, it would be almost immediately overwritten by their supported version as soon as the modem connected to their network anyway.
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reply to Meatball
Yeah, unfortunately, that's not going to happen. TWC only offers these awful Ubee modems for DOCSIS 3, and on top of that they've started charging a modem rental fee.

You can buy your own modem, but you're limited to the SB6121 and the 6141, and they've told me they'll never update a customer owned modem, so I'm going to be stuck.

reply to Meatball

Re: SB6141 Firmware Update?

Alright, I have a bit more information, none of it great though. I'm still seeing random modem reboots/disconnects anywhere from 10-20 times a day. Sometimes it'll go a few hours without happening, other times it'll have 4 times in an hour.

I talked to two different people in Time Warner yesterday, and they are claiming the signal is fine, and it's probably the modem. They told me that as long as downstream power levels are within -15 to +15 dBmV and upstream is between +30 and +53 dBmV the signal is fine. They put my modem on some sort of 'watch list' to track it, but told me to contact Motorola.

So, I talked to Motorola, and this guy really sounded like he knew what he was talking about. He's saying it's the signal. The modem needs a signal more along the lines of -5 to +5 dBmV downstream, with closer to 0 being better, and 'high 30's to low 40's' dBmV upstream, with 40 being better. I'm seeing downstream power levels of +6 to +8 and upstream of +35, so he's saying the modem is rebooting because these levels are out of whack. I asked if there was any way I could get a newer firmware, but no dice, they'll only give that out to ISP's.

So, I had a TWC tech come out today to do a full check of the line and try to get things closer to the range Motorola wants. He said that the Ubee modems aren't as sensitive and they work fine with the -15 to +15 and +30 to +53 power levels. But he also made two comments that caught my interest.

First, apparently everyone is having issues with the Motorola's on TWC, and he says he's getting a call every day or two for the same issue with them rebooting. After about a month of use, he says everyone starts getting that, and they're not sure why, but they really can't do anything about it.

Second, he made an offhand comment that he wonders if TWC is actually doing it on purpose so everyone goes back to the leased modems. Lovely, eh?

Regardless, he checked the line and was able to get things down to 0 to +1 dBmV downstream and +43 dBmV upstream. He left about 2 hours ago and I've already seen one disconnect/reboot. Not really sure where to go from here, but it's BS.

reply to Meatball
Meatball, I (and I'm sure others) appreciate your findings, please continue to update this thread with any progress/information.

I believe I am in the same exact boat you are, what you describe is identical to what I am seeing here as well. Was experiencing 5-15 reboots a day on my very old Motorola SB4100. Purchased a brand new Motorola SB6141 and still experience 5-15 reboots a day. Longest I have gone is 2 days and a few hours without a reboot. Error messages are always the same including: T3 Timeouts, unable to communicate on new upstream channel, unicast ranging received abort response, cable modem reboot due to T4 timeout.

I've had a tech come out as well, checked the lines and all is good. With the current splitter config: upstream power level is at 41 and my downstream levels are at +3. I've tried two other splitter configs where upstream was 46 and downstream was -2; and upstream 49 and downstream -6. In all splitter/signal configurations I still experience the timeouts/reboots.

Again please continue to update with any information. Thanks

I think a lot of this problem stems from the fact that what Time Warner believes are acceptable levels are not acceptable for the Motorola.

Yesterday I finally had enough, so I drove to my local TWC office and got one of their modems. They gave me an Arris DG860A. Plugged it in, came up and within an hour I had a disconnect. I didn't have any problems last evening, but I woke up today to find the modem error logs loaded with the following errors:

- No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out
- DCC-ACK not received
- Received Response to Broadcast Maintenance Request, But no Unicast Maintenance opportunities received - T4 time out
- Unicast Ranging Received Abort Response - initializing MAC
- MIMO Event MIMO: Stored MIMO=-1 post cfg file MIMO=-1

There were at least 4 connection drops in the past 2 hours that I can see. The modem does not appear to be restarting, but the connection drops and it resynchs after about 30-60 seconds. The log doesn't go any further back than that, so I'm assuming it's been doing that all night.

I spoke with another two techs last night, one of which found some signal issues and they're sending out another truck tomorrow. I'm not even sure where to go from here, everytime I talk to someone or they come out, they say it's fine, and within a few hours I start having issues again. Not to mention they all keep contradicting each other. By tomorrow I'll have talked to 6 different TWC support folks on the phone, 3 different support folks through their online chat, had two trucks/techs at my house, went into their office and spent 30 minutes with two people at the desk and been through 2 modems.

Now I see why they keep raising their rates. The amount of money they're wasting to get this fixed is stupid.

PS: Go figure, I went to post this, hit Preview and the site timed out. 2 disconnects while trying to post this...GAH!

I did just notice one thing. The Arris modem is not restarting, but I seem to be dropping connection every 15-30 minutes. During one of these drops, I went to the status screen real quick and did a refresh. I noticed that the power levels for the 4 downstream channels were still good in the 1-2 dBmV range, yet the upstream was dead, as in there was no power level. After about a minute it came back up and upstream was back at 40 dBmV.

Since they're only using one upstream channel, that going down would certainly make it appear to be the whole connection going out since anything I send times out.

reply to Meatball
So even with a different brand modem, Arris, you still see essentially the same exact error messages and disconnects?? Jeez.

What kind of signal problems did tech believe he/she saw? It sounded like the previous tech that came out had put your levels at near perfect.

It seems like there are a number of people nationwide having this problem. Maybe of their approved/leased devices, only 1 or 2 truly still work depending on area? Maybe it is something beyond a modem/residential problem?

I share your frustration as I am experiencing the same dropouts.
Please keep us up to date with any findings.

Well, the tech had put the levels at near perfect, because I had asked him to. When he was about to leave I was getting 7-8 dBmV down and 35 dBmV up, which according to him was in range and should be fine. Knowing that Motorola wanted closer to 0/40 dBmV, I asked him if he could tweak it and he added a splitter in to move the levels to closer to that.

When I started having problems last evening, I pulled the splitter out for a few hours, which included the time when I talked to the tech that saw the 'signal problems' which amazingly were the same levels that the tech was planning to leave them at in the first place. Regardless, I put the splitter back in, but continued to have problems.

I've also figured out that every time it happens I see this in the modem Error Logs.

MIMO Event MIMO: Stored MIMO=-1 post cfg file MIMO=-1;CM-MAC=00:xx:xx:xx:1e:02;CMTS-MAC=00:1b:xx:xx:xx:1x;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;

reply to Meatball
I see those MIMO events quite often in my logs as well. I'm not entirely sure what they are and they do seem to appear in/around/after my stream of timeouts. I have been saving spreadsheets of the modem logs several times a day and also when I experience the timeouts first hand.

Luckily I've only had one today so far at around 2:00PM CST. There were no users on the the network at the time that this happened.

Time Priority Code Message
Dec 29 2012 14:05:13 5-Warning Z00.0 MIMO Event MIMO: Stored MIMO=-1 post cfg file MIMO=-1;CM-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CMTS-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
Jan 01 1970 00:00:52 3-Critical R02.0 No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out;CM-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CMTS-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
Jan 01 1970 00:00:19 3-Critical R07.0 Unicast Ranging Received Abort Response - initializing MAC;CM-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CMTS-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
Jan 01 1970 00:00:14 6-Notice Cable Modem Reboot due to T4 timeout ;CM-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CMTS-MAC=00:00:00:00:00:00;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
Dec 29 2012 14:03:56 3-Critical R04.0 Received Response to Broadcast Maintenance Request, But no Unicast Maintenance opportunities received - T4 time out;CM-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CMTS-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
Dec 29 2012 14:03:26 3-Critical R02.0 No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out;CM-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CMTS-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
Dec 29 2012 14:03:16 4-Error C401.0 DCC-ACK not received;CM-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CMTS-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;
Dec 29 2012 14:03:16 3-Critical R02.0 No Ranging Response received - T3 time-out;CM-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CMTS-MAC=xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx;CM-QOS=1.1;CM-VER=3.0;

Edit: have had 4 or 5 resets between 9PM-midnight, pretty much always the same subset of messages as above. Sometimes I'll see a "16 consecutive T3 Timeouts...." message. This is driving me nuts.

reply to Meatball
Any luck getting this issue resolved? I'm having the same issue... Thanks, Ben

reply to Meatball
I'd be interested to know as well. I'm still experiencing the same issues, have another tech coming out in a week, but will most likely be contacting tier 3 again shortly after the visit.

Yes and no...

Things had been getting extremely bad over the last week, to the point where I was seeing these disconnects every 10-20 minutes. I finally got pushed up to Tier 3 support and after describing my issue, he looked through things and said it was definitely a problem in the 'neighborhood node'. He needed to send out maintenance, but to do that, they had to send another tech to the house. The other thing he verified was that there should never be more than a single splitter in the entire run before the cable modem. Previous techs had come in here and put 3 splitters in line to knock the signal down. Nice, huh?

3rd truck/tech came by yesterday, and this guys seemed to have a clue. He run full tests on the line which takes a couple of minutes and saw the errors. Apparently most techs run a test for 10 seconds and if they don't see anything they stop, but they should be letting them run for 4-5 minutes. He found I had a bad filter in the drop in front of my house, so he replaced that and redid the ends on the cable. Also pulled out all the extra splitters and things have gotten better.

I ran for almost 16 hours without a single disconnect, but since then I've seen 5 or 6 in the past 12 hours. Better, but I still wouldn't consider it fixed. I still don't think the maintenance guys have been out here because my signals are way high and they don't actually call you and tell you that they've been here. I'm seeing 11-13 dBmV downstream and 30-32 dBmV upstream, which is right on the border of being bad. I'm going to have to keep bothering them if it doesn't clear up

So, to offer some suggestions. First, pull everything that they didn't put in place out of the loop. If you have your own router, modem, splitter, switch, whatever, they're going to try to blame that. Make sure there's no more than 1 splitter before the modem. If you get a tech at your house that seems like he knows what he's doing, get his cell phone number, apparently they still 'own' any calls they've gone to for up to 30 days.

Wish I could offer more...

Thanks for the update Meatball.
Your tier 3 conversation/experience sounds very similar to mine.

I spoke to a tier 3 rep for an hour on Sunday and he witnessed two dropouts while I was on the phone with him. He said he would then try to find another house in the neighborhood on the same upstream as me and monitor both of us to see if we both dropped. If he witnessed this, he could then create a ticket that could be escalated up to a network engineer because it is an "area issue". Of course there happened to be no more timeouts for the rest of our phone call, but he said he would pass it off to a team that monitors these things. I know I experienced several timeouts about an hour after our conversation ended. I have not heard from them, and don't really expect to. I haven't tried to call back and ask for any "monitoring" results since I have nothing to reference, and the tier 3 rep said I didn't have to call back.

The tier 3 tech also scheduled another field tech to come to the house. He said he made notes on the service order so the field tech would know what to test. He is supposed to come out next week. He said if the issue persists, call back within 3 days of the tech visit and I should get transferred to tier 3 right away. I'm sure this will be what I end up having to do. I explicitly asked the tier 3 rep if he thought it was something in my house and he said, with what he had seen, no - it seems to be something on their end.

I am convinced it is definitely something beyond the household. I've tried the modem in several locations, with several different splitter configurations resulting in different signals, all within spec (including a configuration with it being the first leg off of the drop). I still continue to experience all of the same type of disconnects/reboots. The last tech that was out said the signals were good and every time I call they say the signal levels are good.

Please continue to update us, it seems like there are several people with this issue on the forums.

Will do as I find out more. While it's definitely better, I just dropped again. Granted, it's only 5 times so far today, but that's still annoying when you're in the middle of things and the connection drops for 2 minutes. Lost a call with my boss twice today which awesome.

I'm calling the tech on his cell phone first thing AM tomorrow and going to try to get him back here. He at least seemed to care to try to find out what's going on, but these intermittent deals make things even worse.

So basically, I've been having problems pretty much since December 13th and there's no end in site. Once they fix it I'm going to raise heck to get reimbursed for a month of service. Not like it matters, it must be nice to be a monopoly

reply to Meatball
I personally would still say 5 times is way too much, it should be 0.
In my case, I have saved spreadsheets of timeouts/disconnects from mid-October. Back then it was 1-2 a day if that. We've had RR for 11 years and have never had any issues that persisted so long.

In December it has been a lot worse, but it seems to vary day to day. In the past 3 weeks I've had an instance where I went 2 days with no disconnects/reboots. And then another instance of 1.5 days with no reboots/disconnects. But then there have been days when I got upwards of 15-20.

When the field tech comes out next week to my place, I am going to stress that I don't think it is anything with our coax/house and I will quote the tier 3 tech on saying that he didn't believe it was within the house either. When I questioned the tier 3 tech why even have a field tech come out, he said just to "cover all bases". One of my fears is that he'll say I need all new coax or a new cable modem. I truly believe it is nothing within the house. I've had virtually 0 issues in 11 years and nothing from a coax or modem/hardware location has changed within the house (except that I have now purchased a new modem because of this issue).

Again, please keep us updated. I am sure there are a few of us who share your frustration