Patent ID: 8046812

Claim:
A CATV system comprising: at least one management device; at least one cable modem connected to the at least one management device via a CATV network; and at least one set top box physically connected to the at least one cable modem; wherein the at least one management device is configured to issue a request for the at least one cable modem to send relevant information about the at least one set top box, designating an address of the at least one cable modem instead of designating an address of the at least one set top box; and gather the relevant information sent from all of the at least one set top box; and the at least one cable modem includes: a memory unit that stores a number representing the number of the at least one set top box and an identification number corresponding to each of the at least one set top box to identify the corresponding at least one set top box; the at least one cable modem further requests each of the at least one set top box to send the relevant information based on the total number of the at least one set top box and the identification number of each of the at least one set top box which are stored in the memory unit, when the at least one cable modem is requested to send the relevant information from the at least one management device; and based on the number representing the number of the at least one set top box and the identification number of each of the at least one set top box, receives the relevant information sent from each of the at least one set top box, and, if a determination is made that a response has not been received from all of the at least one set top box, then the cable modem again looks for a response from each non-responding at least one set top box until receiving the relevant information from all of the at least one set top box; once the relevant information is received from all of the at least one set top box, the cable modem then sends all of the received relevant information from all of the at least one set top box to the at least one management device; and the at least one set top box retrieves the relevant information from a pre-reserved memory area and sends the relevant information to the at least one cable modem, when the at least one set top box is requested to send the relevant information from the at least one cable modem.