Time Warner wants nothing to do with my (own purchased) cable modem beyond allowing me to use it. The vendor will only provide firmware patches to cable operators, and Time Warner won't touch my modem to help get the firmware upgraded.
With cable modems, does/can the provider push firmware?
The last I heard about it the different levels of service (bronze/silver/gold they were at the time, 5/10/20Mbit/s) are just based on the MAC the modem sends on this initial config/handshake. When I moved from 20 to 50 I was told to reboot the modem and it came up will an all new shiny more craptastic than ever web interface as well as setting it's WAN port to 50Mbit/s