Comcast has recently been trying to get all their customers to upgrade their internet modems to ensure we all get faster speeds. Unless you believe Comcast is truly interested in your internet speed, here is the real reason for their interest in upgrading your modem. Their new modems come with a public Wi-Fi accessible to all Comcast customers that is hosted by each modem owner.
Actually, this feature is a pretty handy technology if you are a Comcast customer. You have access to Wi-Fi just about anywhere you go, thanks to mostly unwitting customers. I guess that’s the problem I have with it – it was rolled out with no explanation to its customers and it was an opt-in by default program.
So this was enough to finally get me to install my own modem, and save the $10 a month modem rental Comcast has been charging me for being lazy. I had bought a Motorola Surfboard SB6121 several months ago, but couldn’t get it to recognize my home network. I figured at that point it was a problem with my wireless router, so I set it aside for a few months. Recently I replaced my old router, so I no longer had an excuse.
If you plan to do this yourself I have a couple tips. Dwight Silverman has a pretty good article that sums up the steps to go through, but I have a couple of points to add.
Before starting, I opened up a Comcast chat window and contacted their support through that. I told them via chat that I wanted to install my own modem and the person (or the robot – kind of hard to tell) on the chat said I had to give them the mac address and serial number. This is better than sending this over the phone because you can’t review what you told them easily, and its more likely the person on the other end might typo a number. After waiting 5-10 minutes (and getting a stream of information about their exciting special upgrade offers), I was told to try swapping out the modem.
After swapping the modem, I lost my ability to browse the internet – so I was thinking it wasn’t working. However, my chat was still active with Comcast, so I realized that Comcast was just blocking HTTP traffic until the modem was activated. After waiting another few minutes, the Comcast Rep told me I had to call a number to get my modem activated. Now my land line phone was not working because it runs through the network, so I had to use my cell phone. After going through all the security questions again, my new Comcast rep tried a couple things, and suddenly my internet was working.
All told this process took about 45 minutes. If you plan to do this yourself, I recommend doing this via chat to ensure your modem is working prior to activation, and have your cell phone handy if use have a VoIP land line.
If you don’t plan to do this – I thank you and I look forward to using the public Wi-Fi you are providing when I am in your neighborhood.