đź”– Deals If you don't own your cable modem...

I've had crap luck with cheap networking products, my Motorola modem is very stable. I was going through $50 routers at about 1 a year roughly so I ended up assembling a PFsense router from a low power mini ITX system and set the router to AP mode. It's been incredible stable for long durations of time. PFsense has been up for 249 days straight without a fault or reboot, and the large local cache is pretty cool. It retains all the little bits of web pages so they're loaded from the local network, web pages load faster since only new content needs to be pulled down. I can set it up to do on the fly virus scanning and blocking too, very handy if you've got idiots that click everything and use Windows.
 

Thirdgen89GTA

Aka "That Focus RS Guy"
TCG Premium
Sep 19, 2010
19,295
15,653
Rockford
Real Name
Bill
This isn't a wireless modem. This is a wired modem and then you also need a wifi router.

You an buy combo gateways.

Double edged sword though.

On one hand, combo gateways are usually cheaper, but they aren't as good as discrete pieces of equipment. And when one part of that combo falls out of date (usually the Wireless part) you have to replace the entire thing to get an upgrade.

Whereas using a separate modem, router, and access point costs you more up front, its much cheaper to keep going. And when you upgrade you are only upgrading the device that is obsolete.

Wireless is advancing the fastest so having a separate wireless access point is nice because you can upgrade that ONE item while keeping the rest in play.
 

Lord Tin Foilhat

TCG Conspiracy Lead Investigator
TCG Premium
Jul 8, 2007
60,686
56,744
Privy Chamber
Mine showed up today. Just call Xfinity support and give them the router info and away I go? Or whats the process here?

you may be able to just do it online with a wizard on their website. Mine didnt activate when I did this a few months ago but I was also becoming a new customer and they messed something up which made me have to call them to activate it.
 

Eagle

Nemo me impune lacessit
Moderator
TCG Premium
Mar 1, 2008
63,904
4,732
Woodsticks, IL
Xfinity customer service is such a joke. Even in person. They closed the local Comcast shop, so I had to drive to Crystal lake. It's a combined VZW Xfinity store. There is one person at the front desk greeting people and putting them into a queue. There's one more actually helping people all the way in the rear of the store. There are 5 or 6 people waiting in line. It's moving stupid slow.

All this to save $10/mo. I SO need to cancel this service.
 

Gamble

TCG Elite Member
May 23, 2015
1,935
736
just got around to getting this installed today
I used the free cell spot router (asus) from tmobile

https://support.t-mobile.com/docs/DOC-24795#firstheading

The modem is wayyy smaller than I thought

Set the wifi name/pw the same as the old one and it took me to the comcast site where I logged in, hit ok and bam done. Didn't even ask for the mac address or anything. couldn't get any more simple than that

however i do still have to call to make sure it's coming off my bill and figure out where to bring this old one back

new router has a 5ghz and 2.4ghz band. On my 4 year old laptop i'm getting 55mbps (2.4ghz since it won't do 5ghz) download. on the new desktop on 5ghz i'm getting 88mbps.
 
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