Patent ID: 7590129

Claim:
A method for communicating management information with a destination residential gateway as a customer premises equipment (CPE) in a digital subscriber network, comprising: transmitting the CPE management information as data packets addressed to a selected one of a plurality of predetermined management path addresses exclusively associated with CPE management in the network, each management address of the plurality uniquely identifying one of a plurality of CPE's in the network; reconfiguring the data packets to translate the selected one of the plurality of management path addresses to a predetermined fixed address, the predetermined fixed address being common to the plurality of CPE's in the network and the predetermined fixed address is a private Internet Protocol address for locally managing the residential gateway and the predetermined fixed address is a private Internet Protocol address for locally managing the CPE; transmitting the CPE management information to a destination CPE as reconfigured data packets addressed to the predetermined fixed address; and determining if the destination CPE is in an enabling state enabling communication with the network via a dynamically assigned address, wherein the step of transmitting the CPE management information as data packets addressed to a selected one of a plurality of predetermined management path addresses is performed if the destination CPE is not in the enabling state.