Seeing the problems you have faced i can understand why you get fed up with
the cable company.
Some states have no problems with speeds ect others seem to have no end to
them.


--
AL'S COMPUTERS
"Joseph Gwinn" wrote in message
s.com...
On Oct 4, 2016, Andy wrote
(in ):

Why would you want to pay spectrum up wards of $ 10.00 a month to rent a
cable modem from them?
In less then a years rental time and cost you could buy a good modem and
or
modem wireless router combination for the same or less money.
I have stopped paying them a model rental fee the day it came out.
I my self use a Motorola cable modem and love it and spectrum fully
supports
it .
Because it is one of the models on its approved modems list so they cant
refuse to support it

I do the same, for the same reason. I'm on COMCAST, but it's the same
story.

When the transition from DOCSIS 2 to DOCSIS 3 became mandatory, I decided
to
buy my cable modem, for money reasons, but at least as importantly,
because
what COMCAST wanted to provide got terrible reviews on technical grounds.
They also wanted to be your WiFi base station, but with a very weak WiFi
radio, and no obvious way to turn the WiFi function off. (Perhaps there is
a
way, but it proved impossible to get a real user manual for that modem,
and
so one must presume guilt.) I already have a wired network with a WiFi arm
that all work just fine.

So I worked through COMCAST's list of approved DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems,
and
chose one that did only that, no VOIP phone or WiFi pretensions,
specifically
ARRIS SurfBoard SB6183 for about $90, if I recall. The payback period is
about 9 months.

After getting everything working (and batting away various attempts to get
me
to ditch the SB6183 and use the COMCAST offering), things went well for at
least a year. Then, the performance began to degrade. I didn't notice at
first, but the issue came to a head when I was unable to download a 3
GByte
file - it would struggle for six hours, and always fail. Now, I have 25
Mbit/sec service, so this should take about 15 minutes. When I measured
the
speed using COMCAST's own Xfinity Speed Test, I got 411 Kbits/sec. Huh?

So I contacted COMCAST Support, first by internet Chat to someone who
seemed
to be in India. He walked me through the usual diag steps, none of which
worked, all the while insisting that the problem was the ARRIS modem.
Nope -
It's an approved modem. One observation was key: If I used the nearby
Boston, MA server, I got far higher speed than to the remote Detroit and
Chicago servers (which are near to the source of the 3 GB file). Well,
that
cannot be a modem issue, and can only be a COMCAST network problem.

Anyway, the guy in India gave up, and escalated to Advanced Tech Support,
a
woman on the telephone calling from the US somewhere. She reiterated the
bit
about the ARRIS modem, and I made the points about the meaning of
"approved". Again, no test changed the speed. Modem make came back up.
Well, "approved" means that I can expect to get the 25 Mbit/s data rate
I'm paying for. Or, is COMCAST putting proprietary stuff in their
interpretation of DOCSIS 3, so that no other modem will work? At this
point,
the conversation dwindled, and I said that I'd go and do all the tests
that
had been suggested but couldn't be performed without dropping the chat to
India, and the conversation ended.

First test was to hook computer directly to cable modem, which could not
be
done without rebooting (because the DHCP server was not the cable modem).
All
of a sudden, speeds had jumped from less than 1 Mbit/second to around 88
Mbits/sec. Wow. Put the internal network back into the path. Still 88
Mbits.
Ran a test from my wife's laptop, via WiFi - still 88 Mbits.

This whole drama basically cost me the weekend. All that testing confused
a
number of unrelated devices and their drivers, requiring debugging and
network scanning.

The 88 Mbits was during the weekend. As the week progressed, the speed did
drop. As I write, it's 15 Mbits/sec for downloads, and 6.5 Mbits for
uploads.

Joe Gwinn