DOCSIS 3: So This is How Modems Should Work - December 31st, 2009

We picked up a new Motorola cable-modem lastnight, and it changed everything. It’s a SURFboard model, but not the common 5-series, this one’s their new DOCSIS 3.0 standard-compliant beast, the SB6120.

Using the old, hand-me-down pile of crap that Comcast originally gave us, we were lucky to attain downspeeds of 10 Mbps, while upload speeds rarely broke 1.8 Mbps, and usually hovered far lower. Many people have beef with Comcast, but fact is, it’s not so much their lines that drag service down in most areas, it’s the modems.

30+ Mbps Down, 4+ Up

I talked to a Comcast service employee a while back, and asked him about line speeds. He told me that technically, while we were only ordering the regular 15 Mbps service, we’d be able to milk it up to about 20 Mbps with a slightly better, commercially available modem (as opposed to the failbox he was handing me). I made a mental note to check out modems, but left it at that for the time being.

After a pretty severe outage incident late one night (while I was working), a gracious Comcast service rep offered to upgrade my account to the 18 Mbps connection. Of course, having never actually seen my speeds reach anywhere near the original speed limit, I was skeptical of actually seeing any improvement so long as I had to cope with the loaner modem. As it turns out, Comcast is far looser with their line speeds than they let on to be.

Check out the SB6120 at Motorola.

After initial setup — which means basically trying to connect to the internet and getting Comcastrolled by the annoying customer service roadblock for first time connections — the first thing I noticed was that instead of loading, webpages seemed to explode onto my screen. It was amazing, fantastic, ridiculous and euphoric all at the same time. I immediately speed-tested, and after seeing the results, repeated the test again, then again, and again.

I spent 100 dollars on this modem at Best Buy (because it was there, and I hate shipping costs). I’m not sure if I’ve ever gotten so much out of 100 bucks in my life, since everything done online in my apartment happens three times faster than it did a day ago. Bravo Motorola, and additional thanks go to Comcast for being so liberal with connection speeds.