Maspro Denkoh's advanced technology group was required to design a complete turn-key cable modem (CM) solution using condense 1U rack hardware for the domestic japanese market. They contacted Weird Solutions for DHCP and TFTP services to complete the offering, looking for key services that were robust and fast enough to handle many thousands of simultaneous transfers.

Masayuki Kimata in Research and Development explained: "We looked at Microsoft's embedded DHCP server but we soon discovered that it was incapable to handle registration of 10,000 reservations, the OS would always crash. Our requirements were even tougher, we wanted to to be able to reserve 20,000 addresses on the DHCP server."

Cable modem devices also require large and simultaneous TFTP transfers of configuration files. Masayuki continues: "In CATV networks, when updating cablemodem firmware, megabyte-size files need to be transferred to thousands of cablemodems - simultaneously . This is a severe environment for a TFTP server. Initially we tried to use freeware TFTP servers, but they did not have enough performance and stability for our environment. After evaluation we adopted TFTP Turbo, which we found to have a low cost and provided the needed high speed operation. We also noted that TFTP Turbo consumed low amounts of CPU resources."