Sleek But Slow

Author's Rating:

Pros: Nice looking; separate power supply; multiple mounting options.

Cons: S - L - O - W

The Bottom Line: 
Sometimes you shouldn't buck conventional wisdom. The Motorola Surfboard is the superior product. If you doubt this, I suggest you try my experiment and see for yourself.

Author's Review
I made the switch from dial-up to cable modem four months ago. Now, I can't imagine life without broadband. I started out renting a modem supplied by my cable company, Advanced Cable, with the idea that if I decided to keep the service I would buy my own in a few months.

The rental unit was a new-in-the box Motorola Surfboard, which worked well. I then bought the Linksys EtherFast unit and returned the Motorola. I went with the Linksys based on generally positive reviews and a $25 mail-in rebate. At the time, the Motorola and Toshiba units did not have rebates, so they were more expensive.

After the switch, I noticed that my browser would sometimes stall when trying to load difficult web pages, but I've replaced so much equipment in the past few months that I wasn't sure if the Linksys unit or some other hardware was at fault, or if web traffic was to blame. I got a clue when I went to the cable company's office and returned the Motorola. The cable guys asked me what I replaced it with. When I told them I bought the Linksys, each of the three behind the counter made a face like they had just smelled a turd. One told me that in their experience the Motorola was the better product, to which the others agreed.

At the time I thought, a cable modem is a cable modem, right? Well, the next week the Best Buy where I bought the Linksys had the Motorola with a $25 rebate, so I bought it and decided to do a side-by-side comparison. But first, I asked a salesperson about their return policy, so I wouldn't be stuck with two modems. When I told him about my planned experiment, he predicted that the Motorola would win, hands-down.

My first impression of the two units, side-by-side, was that the Motorola is as ugly as the Linksys is beautiful. But this test was about performance.

I randomly selected eight internet sites where you can test your download speed. (Upload speed is a less variable number and depends on the system used by your cable provider, so the brand of cable modem you use is irrelevant.) I ran each test twice with the Linksys, dropped the highest and lowest scores, and calculated the average download speed in kilobytes per second (Kbps).

Then I switched the Linksys unit with the Motorola, keeping everything else (cables, computer settings, etc.) the same. I had to call my cable company to give them the MAC address of the Motorola unit before I could go back online. When I told the technician what I was doing, he said he was sure the Motorola would win. He also opined that the Motorola unit was more reliable than the Linksys.

I re-ran the tests from the same eight websites, and I saw a difference from the very first test. When I crunched the numbers, I found that the Motorola was 28% faster than the Linksys! Needless to say, the Linksys went back in its box that evening. While I can't say that my results will apply to other people using other cable providers, I'm keeping the Motorola.