Just wanted to note that I had the most painless experience just now upgrading my modem to a DOCSIS 3.0 compatible Motorola with Comcast.
I had one of the ancient 1.0 models because I just never went and swapped it out before now, so I finally purchased a modem today from Best Buy, called Comcast up with the info and was switched to the new modem in about five minutes. I had to do this now because they’re dropping support for the old modems on December 14.
Really surprised me how easy it went. So far so good with the connection too. Cool! Now I just have to upgrade my home network to take advantage of the speed.
I had to replace my cable modem a few months ago, too. I’d been getting horrible lag and stretches of 100% packet loss, and when I called it in, the tech was shocked that I still had such an old modem model (a Motorola CyberSurfr that must have been almost 10 years old). I guess most other people with it already had it replaced due to other problems, moving, etc., and recent changes to Shaw’s infrastructure have exacerbated some kind of incompatibility.
The new one’s much faster, too, and I’ve gone from a peak speed of around 500KB/s to 1.6MB/s.
My network is now the limiting factor. I’ll be upgrading to N-level hardware for my router and network card by the beginning of the new year. I’ve still got B-level router and network card in my PC. The Linksys BEFW11S4 was a great router, but time passed it by long ago.
I guess I was just really surprised at the lack of pain with this upgrade. Comcast often gets a lot of crap, but they were really on the ball. I suppose they’ve done this enough times now that most of the bugs are ironed out, but it was almost too easy.
I’ve always had great performance in games with the old modem and router so it was hard to justify an upgrade. I’m not the type to download massive files regularly either. I don’t use bittorrents and the like. That said, I’m sure the streaming for Netflix will improve tremendously once I get the new router in place, but we just don’t use it that often that it mattered.
