Kitz, I’ll do some digging.
In the meantime, don’t throw away your old modems or any CPE. Never mind if your spouse accuses you oof hoarding, tell him/her it’s for a good cause. We can find somewhere to send it all to. I would volunteer but I don’t have the storage space any more.
I think g.fast modems will be highly valued, because they represent the summit of the DSL art, and because they will be relatively rare. So hang on to yours when you go FTTP.
At the other extreme, I think some early DSL modems will be valuable because of their rarity and because they show that particular point in evolution. Say a USB modem from 20 years ago such as the Thomson Speedtouch ‘frog’ USB modem. Is that correct? The non-USB Speedtouch modems of 20 years ago were really superb IMO, good DSL and amazing software in them, really sophisticated. I doubt that I still have mine, unfortunately. I can’t remember the best model numbers so I’d like some advice.
I think the procedure for storing hardware should be to reset it to factory settings and standard admin IP/username/password, then download and save a copy of the latest manufacturer’s firmware and flash it. Save it somewhere with a readme.txt text file containing full identification info and version number plus the URL the firmware came from. Even if the manufacturer deletes the web pages archive.org / way back machine should archive it all, but best to be on the safe side.
Do you think it would be a good idea to have such readme files in XML and make up our simple standard format for them? That way code could query them all, using XSLT or hack soup code. Or combine them all perhaps.
I’m wondering if eBay can still provide working kit from ten or twenty years ago. I’d like to buy some such kit from eBay but don’t have enough storage and don’t have the facilities to test such kit.
I wonder if in certain cases, where kit to be archived has a PSU brick that is nasty, ancient or sickly we should replace the brick with a low-cost modern good quality equivalent brick. What do you think? That would improve reliability a lot given the age of some desireable h/w.
And the question of what to acquire if absent among our number, the must-haves?