Belong ISP Updating Their Terms, Maybe Dropping Third Party Modem Support And Speed Throttling
(straight from email)
• We're adding a term to make sure our customers use equipment that complies with relevant standards.
• We are adding a right to slow your service if we reasonably believe you’ve breached our Acceptable Use Policy.
• We're adding more definitions to what we consider ‘unfair, unreasonable or inappropriate use’.
• If a customer treats our people in an abusive or threatening way, we may end the interaction and – in extreme cases – we may stop offering our service to them altogether.
From a hardware point if view; how would they even know you’d changed the firmware?
They probably wouldn't but it's the principle of it. But yeah on your first point, it's certainly a "devil is in the details" type situation. It could range anywhere from "no phone support" to you have to buy and use their bundled modem/router (and everything in between).
Your router isn't a modem, they don't care what router you use.
Not sure what kind of ISP these guys are, but I'm assuming coax based, in which case they probably are adding terms saying you need to use more modern DOCSIS modems. This is most likely because they are going to start to phase out support for older DOCSIS standards.
Most of this will be installed by NBN (National Broadband Network) contractors. Non NBN based connections are pretty uncommon these days, although the OP doesn't specify.
Anyway that was the reason I assumed that other networking equipment would be relevant (such as routers) because there isn't such thing as a third party device for most of the above. The OP used "modem" but I know a lot of Austalians use the term interchangeably, probably from the history of ADSL where modem-router combinations were common.