Makes me glad I took the self-install, buy my own modem route. I don’t think I could tolerate waiting on Comcast to get me a new modem when Best Buy is only five minutes away.
If this is true, then the cable company can/should turn around and sue the hardware provider. The cable modem passed some DOCSIS standards, and should be rated to whatever the heck DOCSIS level specs!
Alternatively, there is flow control within TCP to throttle you back to Cable Modem speeds anyways. If this wasn’t the case, you won’t be able to do those nifty speed tests to find out Comcast is faster/slower than i-don’t-know-who-does-DSL-in-US?.
Edit: DOCSIS not DOCSYS
I checked on best buy and I found the 5100 version of the surfboard for $80. Besides being newer what is different from the 3100 that I have? The chance of Comcast having it is pretty slim at this point, does anyone know what hoops I’m going to have to jump thru if I buy a modem not directly from Comcast to use their service?
Quick tech question the SB5101 and the SB5120, what is the difference besides the 5120 being the higher version?
Resing the thread to ask a quick question. I just got my SB 5120 in the mail today and I’m planning on hooking it up tomorrow. Besides just hooking it up and giving comcast the mac address, is there anything else I need to worry about getting it set properly? It comes with some CD on it for the USB drivers, but if I didn’t need to do that for my 3100, do I need to run the installation?
Very unlikely - the only reason to run that would be some wizard to set up login requirements (user/pw). I’ve only seen that on Verizon DSL, forget name. PeoP or something like that.
btw you ARE using a router right?
This probably applies to other cable firms as well. I found this out when a tier-1 CSR took pity on me after something like a dozen futile calls about a bad modem (the ethernet interface was bad, and they were testing the cable interface remotely, so they couldn’t find anything wrong).
If you are tired of bouncing between tier 1 and tier 2 people who insist that the everything is working when you’re sure it’s not: you can require them to send a truck. You pay the cost of the truck if it turns out there is in fact no problem with the hardware, but they pay if it really is broken. For some reason, their policy is not to actually let you know this, but as I said, a sympathetic CSR let it slip…
Of course if you have an intermittent fault in a cable modem that is hard to reproduce, this is not necessarily a good idea, and the suggestion of going to the service center yourself to swap the modem out is a better idea, but I thought I’d mention this in case it was was useful to someone.
As an aside, Comcast CS was so incredibly bad that I abandoned them for Verizon DSL, which of course offers a technically inferior service (FIOS not available in my area yet). I just couldn’t take any more rounds of entering my account number into 3 different automated interfaces only to hear, after an hour of waiting, the first question from the human rep “what’s your account number?” I don’t claim that Verizon customer service is actually good, but they’re infinitely superior to Comcast.
No I’ve never used a router, why?
edit: Now it’s hooked up, the only tough parts were getting the wires to the modem and dealing with comcast. Other then that its working.
Oh Pfreak you should totally use a router. Don’t leave your computer to the internets unprotected, nasty viruses!~!~!
Doesn’t even matter which router. Even cheap, aging routers will do the job so you’re not completely exposed.