3.5X Speed Improvement over Toshiba Docsis 1.1 Modem

Author's Rating:

Pros: If you have a Docsis 1.1 modem, pitch it in favor of this.

Cons: $60 cost beyond the crazy cable modem monthly fee!

The Bottom Line: 
Given all that we pay for cable internet service, we might as well get our money's worth on bandwidth, and this does it.

Author's Review
I was having some unrelated problems and decided to see if a new cable modem would fix things. I've been running with a Toshiba PCX2200 (Docsis 1.1) for a few years, has worked fine.

I got the Motorola 5120 from Circuit City with a $20 rebate, was reasonably priced at $59 after rebate. It's the only 'name brand' retail available modem on the Adelphia recommended web site, not sure why the other popular ones are missing.

Since both modems are up and running I was able to do multiple speed tests pretty close to the same time, and the improvement is phenomenal.

I used 5 speed tests from 3 different sites and the average download performance improvement was 3.5x better, while the average upload performance was 7x better.

I don't know if it's Docsis 2.0 or the Motorola modem design, but it's way fast - up to 6Mbps downloads on my setup.

Adelphia says that they are completely Docsis 2.0 upgraded, but obviously you should check with your cable provider to see if it's true for you in your area - you may not see any improvement if they are running old server hardware.

Setup couldn't have been easier on my Mac - unplug the old one, plug in the new one and that's it. (I called Adelphia to register the new mac address, not clear that was actually necessary, they say they have some auto registration scheme.) Took more time to reboot than anything else.

I'm told that the Motorola has a web interface that lets you measure signal strength, etc, haven't tried that yet (since I didn't load any software nor read any manuals.)