This morning I did something I’ve been putting off for months. I replaced our more than ten year old DOCSIS 1.0 cable modem with a new, DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem. My Internet service provider, Comcast, began sending me nastygrams more than six months ago, warning me that they were going to drop DOCSIS 1.0 at the end of October and I’d need to upgrade to a new compatible cable modem.
I’ve been renting my cable modem from Comcast. I figured that the reduced fingerpointing in case of problems was worth the few bucks a month they charged me. A couple of months ago I finally bit the bullet and asked them to send me a new cable modem. I was quite disappointed when they sent me a low end, El Cheapo modem (compared to the SB4100 it was replacing). Then I dragged my feet for a bit more.
The other day when I was at Costco I saw an SB6141 cable modem (they’re generally highly rated) on sale so I bought one.
I installed our last cable modem before self-install was even an option that Comcast offered. I let the technician they’d sent out fumble around for a half hour or so, gently nudged him out of the way, and installed it myself. It, too, was a replacement so it was no sweat. I’ve installed installed a half dozen others for friends and neighbors since then. The process has never gone completely smoothly and in some cases disastrously badly. Another reason I was dragging my feet.
Well, I disconnected the old modem, replaced it with the new, attempted to go through the installation process, it failed (as usual), and I called Comcast. A half hour later the new cable modem was working.
As soon as I had Internet connectivity back, I did a bandwidth test. My bandwidth had almost doubled, from roughly 15 MBps downloads to 30 MBps downloads. I’ll keep my fingers crossed.
Porn in half the time!
Stories like this make me skeptical about public policy proposals that rely a lot on home access to the internet.
I was experiencing intermittent internet problems last Winter, and was convinced by the evidence that the problem was not my ten-plus year modem, and it turned out I was wrong. I experienced both very positive and very negative customer service from the provider, and finally acceded to their recommendation that I buy a new modem, but not the one they recommended. The mass of knowledgeable on-line sources recommended a different modem that my provider refused to certify as compatible. The modem has worked very well (after calling my provider for help) and solved my problems, but a scan of the reviews at amazon shows that about one out of every hundred reviews of this particular modem is from someone whose modem quickly melted down, sometimes killing small plants and pets.
Its 2013. Some people dream of flying cars. I dream that all hardware was truly plug and play and diagnostics were at least as good as on my Chevy.