Thats dumb. My parents never turned ours off. Even If they did turn off, my switch it lets me reset my cable modem throuh the switches IP and when you reset it via the switch it turns back on (or off).
the easiest thing for you to do is check whether or not the modem can be acticated via software IE through umm IE (sorry for the pun) You can get cheap DSL modems online for a few dollars these days, I bought a second one I mounted in a PC.
