[ale] Need Cable Modem Recommendation

Lightner, Jeffrey JLightner at dsservices.com
Tue Jul 19 11:22:41 EDT 2016


I don't have business class so the comments below are related to residential.   

Like others I recommend the Motorola/Aris Surfboard.   I finally replaced my docsys 2.0 with a docsys 3.0 model when Comcast required me 2 but in nearly 10 years of service I had no issues attributable to either modem.   In fact that original modem survived a near lightning strike years ago that fried various electronics including my TV and a Linksys router.

I also recommend the NetGear stuff - I bought one of those to replace a flakey Belkin a couple of years back and have been happy with it so far.

Comcast once tried to convince me the issue with my original modem was on my end rather than theirs even though it was clear from the lights on the modem that it wasn't getting signal from the cable even after the standard 2 minute power removal they always suggest.

-----Original Message-----
From: ale-bounces at ale.org [mailto:ale-bounces at ale.org] On Behalf Of Solomon Peachy
Sent: Tuesday, July 19, 2016 10:29 AM
To: Atlanta Linux Enthusiasts
Subject: Re: [ale] Need Cable Modem Recommendation

On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 10:13:37AM -0400, Chris Fowler wrote:
> Last year at our office our service would go down. It always seemed to happen during a presentation to customers, prospects, etc. You can imagine how urgent fixing it became. The SMC modem provided no data in an automated way. I wrote a program that would test the Internet via ping and then if there was failure it would web scrape that modem and look for stats. It turned out that the mode reported all was well during these events. I tested vs our network by testing from the ethernet of the modem vs our internal router connected to it. Same issues. 

At $dayjob, we had one of those SMC modems -- and it also gave us stabiliy issues.  It was eventually replaced with a Netgear box, and things have been problem-free since then.

I also have one of those Netgear boxes at home, and it hasn't so much as hiccupped in the past three or so years -- or at least every outage was upstream of my local node. (As an aside, I've probably paid Comcast triple the box's MSRP, but such is the joy of ComcastBiz and static IPs)

They still don't offer static IPv6 addresses, though it's at least being tested in a few markets.  I will be quite pissed if they try to charge an additional premium for that on top of what I'm paying for static IPv4.

 - Solomon
-- 
Solomon Peachy        		       pizza at shaftnet dot org
Delray Beach, FL                          ^^ (email/xmpp) ^^
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.



More information about the Ale mailing list