Netgear CM1000 activation woes

Recived my new Netgear CM1000 from Amazon yesterday 6-JAN-2017 and activated in Portland Oregon today 7-JAN-2017.

In my case I followed the activation instructions exactly and appeared that activation webforms worked as documented but I didn't get internet connectivity.  I did have connectivty to the CMTS as logging into the Netgear CM1000 I saw that I had strong connection with 24 down stream and 4 upstream Docsis 3.0 channels which is the most that Comcast provisions in my area at this time.

I called Comcast and for some reason they couldn't explain the self activiation had not added the modem to my account.  They took the CM information over the phone and added the CM to the account manually.  After some playing around we discovered that I needed to reboot the modem again and run thorugh the self activiation screens again.  After this I had internet connectivity.  A few days ago I was notified by Comcast that we were upgraded to 200 mbit/s service.  After the upgrade to this new CM I've consistiantly gotten 230-240 mbit/s down and 12 mbit/s up on several different speed test sites (Netflix's fast.com, the Comcast/Xfinity speed test, speedtest.com, etc.)  My previous CM with only 4 download and 4 upload channels maxed out at 170 mbit/s down and 12 mbit/s up.

When I connected my router (a commerical grade PFSense SG-4860 made by Netgate) I lost network connectivity.  Turns out every time I change the device connected to the Netgear CM1000 ethernet port I have to do a reboot of the Netgear CM1000 for it and the CMTS to allocate an IP address to the newly connected device.

I normally request a /60 IPv6 network allocation from Comcast (16 IPv6 networks is the most they seem to give to non-commerical customers in the Portland area.)  I noticed that my DHCPv6 request had not honored my /60 request and had only allocated a single IPv6 network.  I've had this problem in the past with Comcast where the CMTS caches the first DHCPv6 request (per MAC address) for two weeks and refuses to honor a refresh request with a differnet parameters.  The work around I've found to work best is to spoof a different MAC address on the router WAN port and power cycle the cable modem and router at the same time.  I have also found that that if my IPv6 address prefix changes that I have to manually clear the PFSense DHCPv6 servers cache and reboot all devices like my Windows Laptop that are requesting IPv6 addresses from DHCPv6 (note: this is not an issue for any IPv6 devices that use autoconfiguration like my cell phones.)  This worked and I now have the CM1000 running with a /60 DHCPv6 address allocation for all my internal networks.

Finally my old CM (an Arris TG722g Cable Modem with Voice eMTA) could not be removed from my account by the Comcast phone agent.  As I'm going to sell this old modem I went in to the local Comcast/Xfinity retail store and had them remove the device (5 minute wait and <5 minutes once I could see an agent.)  I also asked the agent when the "Gigibit" service using Docsis 3.1 would be available in Portland Oregon.  He said there is no offical word yet but the rumors are leaning towards a late March or April introduction.