Arris 550A Modem

Oh, I see one says NO CD. Do I need that? The other sellers don't mention they have it. Mikek

Wow, I found this compatibility list for my ISP.

Mikek

This refurbished Cisco unit is $19.

I find nothing negative in a search.

This is Docsis-3-0 vs the Docsis-2-0 that I have. Might save me an upgrade in a few years.

Mikek

I googled "Symptom: talks to himself" and found that's an indication of schizophrenia.

What's new?

Well not a lot going on, had the day off, went to the dentist.

How was that?

New dentist, told him I don't use Novocain, Had two fillings, no anesthesia, harder on the dentist than me.

hmm.

Mikeks

Did you notice that the list was dated April 1 ? I would be careful about taking such a list seriously.

Definitely buy DOCSIS 3.0. I've been pushing Motorola/Arris SB6141 modems and amazingly have had no surprises, failures, or weirdness so far.

That is a little unsettling, but I don't find any other WOW modem list.

I think I've done my due diligence.

I'm looking, probably about $35 to $40 with shipping.

Thanks, Mikek

Costco has the SB6141 for about $75. Most everywhere else, it's about $90. The really cheap ones on eBay are usually "stolen" from Comcast or other service provider, where the user canceled his cable service, but didn't return his rented modem. I have a few of those that I paid about $25/each. Comcast will not activate them. About all I can do is give them back (or do a tear down and reverse engineering on the guts). I don't know if WOW has a similar policy. Just be careful of incredible bargains. Those always have some kind of problem.

Thanks, with that information, I think I'll try the Cisco from a refurbisher fot $18.95. They report 397 sold.

Mikek

That's comparable to the SB6141 with the same 8 bonded channels down, and 4 bonded channels up. Not much risk at $20/ea and much cheaper than the Motorola/Arris variety. However, since it's not on the Comcast approved list: I haven't seen any (yet). The DCP3008 is on the Comcast list and has had plenty of "issues" with dropped connections about 2 years ago. No clue if it's been fixed. This is typical: I don't see any similar history for the DPC3010 but that's understandable because it wasn't available at the time, and Comcast doesn't use it. Do some Googling, take your chances, and hope for the best.

Regarding the "usually stolen" thing, there must be at least one other explanation. Back in around 2006-2007 I bought a lot of 10 SB5120's for $60 (with free shipping) from an Ebay seller in China who had claimed to have sold hundreds. As it turned out, I didn't need all 10, but their other lot sizes were 25, 50, and 100. Anyway, of the ones that I actually registered with Comcast, none were in their database and they registered without issues.

I received the DPC3010, I called WOW and after 50 minutes on the phone, two times on hold with the tech, the second time after about 12 minutes on hold, I got a second phone and called tech support again. The second tech worked through all the stuff, finally bypassing my router (that worked before I made the call) and we got connected at full speed. During all this, the first phone with all the WOW propaganda is running, then at the 50 minute mark it hung itself up. After I hung up I reconnected my router and it all works fine. But it took 1:16 minutes to do.

At first hook up of the new modem it worked but I checked the speed and it was only 1.02 Mbps, the tech wanted me to remove any splitters and my router. I pointed out they all worked minutes ago before I changed the modem. I suggested we go back to the original modem, he said he would put the old modem info back in the system. At some point he put me on hold. I was doing speed tests the whole time, even before he said he would put the modem info into the system, it was always right at

1Mbps. Is it normal for the system to start out at 1Mbps and verify data before it speeds up to what the customer pays for?

It works now, pain in ass though. Mikek

Kinda sounds like support wasn't very experienced with provisioning new modems. Very odd as it's one of the more common things they do.

Bad idea. With Comcast, one of the first things that happens when a new modem is provisioned is that the firmware is upgraded to whatever Comcast considers optimum. This is especially important if the modem is used and came from another network provider. With Comcast, the firmware upgrade usually takes about 20 minutes and involves at least

2 or 3 reboots (which you can see by the lights). If you unplug the modem, or make it excessively busy with too much traffic, the firmware upgrade will fail, and you're likely to end up with a "brick" for a modem. I know, because I had to learn this the hard way.

Yes. The firmware updates are intentionally done at the slowest speed to reduce the likelyhood of transmission errors.

One must suffer before enlightenment.

The fact that there are billions and billions of bits moving along the fiber and most of them get to the right destination (along with the government getting their share), this truly is amazing.

The rep did say, sometimes it takes from minutes to 24 hrs for the speed to get from 1Mbps up to normal.

Mikek

Yes, but if only a few bits are lost, your movie pixelates and your audio turns to garble. Some bits are just more important than others.

Welcome to the Comcast planet, where anything is possible: "When you upgrade your speed tier, you may experience speeds faster than your plan allows for at first."

We had that happen in my palatial office Comcast cable internet. When first provisioned, there was no rate cap at all. At one point, it was up to 85 Mbit/sec download. However, now it's down to only 16 Mbits/sec. Sniff.

By coincidence, I upped the speed on Comcast last night (some things are best done under cover of darkness) from the cheapo $29/month 3 Mbit/sec service, to the regular 12-18 Mbit/sec service (for $20/month more). The upselling support personality indicated that the speed increase would happen "immediately". Right. It crept up from 3.0 to

3.5 Mbit/sec and stayed there for the rest of the evening. I have no clue if it went up to the higher speed, but since my cell phone isn't ringing furiously, I'll assume that it worked.

WOW is probably different, but I thought you might be amused how things work on the Comcast planet.

I waited a couple of days and all was fine with my new modem, so I returned WOW's modem to them. Of course the counter lady had to poke a bunch of info into the computer and was very happy that I had the model number of my new modem. I When I got home, I couldn't get online, so I called WOW for another session, the tech wanted the MAC number again, for some reason his computer still had the first USB MAC that I gave them by mistake (one digit different, B instead of A) We corrected that and reset and it worked.

I wonder if they make it difficult on purpose and want me to broadcast, that getting your own modem (instead of paying $96 a year to rent) is a real pain in the ass. Hey, maybe they will send me $50 for my advertisement. Mikek

If it happens again (it will), ask the support tech if he's on a Windoze machine and running a browser. If so, have him hit [F5] to flush the cache. If that still displays the old MAC address, try . Some browsers also flush everything with .

Better a pain in the ass than a pain in the wallet.