Offloading Cable Modem operations to Router

I may be crazy here, but I seem to recall a conversation in the past stating that it was possible to offload some of the operations taken by one's cable modem to one's router.

The logic was that since the cable modem is often equipped with a cheaper processor as it is supplied by your provider, that it often chokes even crashes when you start a torrent or something else with a lot of connections. I seem to recall that some routers offered the ability to take some of the modem's operations.

Is this possible or have I imagined the whole thing? I ask because my modem seems to have many issues when I start torrents.

Solution 1:

Sometimes you can configure a cable modem to operate in either "bridging" mode - whereby it forwards Ethernet packets directly to the next Ethernet device and that device is responsible for establishing and maintaining the PPP connection - or the mode you're more used to whereby the cable modem performs the actions of the router.

Probably not the case in your situation but you could investigate for a "bridging" mode if it has one.