Replacing your Internet Modem for fun and profit !!

If you take a close look at your monthly bill from the com­pany pro­vid­ing your inter­net ser­vice, you will most likely find a monthly “rental” fee of sev­eral dol­lars a month.    If you learn how to “Keep Pace” with this tech­nol­ogy, you will find a way to elim­i­nate that charge and save some money !

NOTE:  The remain­der of this blog entry assumes you are NOT using Com­cast for your tele­phone ser­vice (which uses a dif­fer­ent modem)

What is the issue ?

Inter­net Ser­vice providers typ­i­cally charge a monthly “rental fee” for the device that enables your Inter­net ser­vice (referred to as a modem).     Com­cast recently increased the rental fee to $7 a month which equates to:

12 months x $7 monthly rental = $84  per year

This $84 is in ADDITION to the cost of the monthly inter­net ser­vice.   As new inter­net modems are usu­ally between $50-$100, the pay­back period for replac­ing your modem is usu­ally around 1 year.

So how do you get started ?

The first step is mak­ing sure a replace­ment is a viable option for you.    So you should first:

• Call your Inter­net Ser­vice provider and ver­ify you can pur­chase your own modem
• Ver­ify the ven­dor (and model num­ber) of  modems the Inter­net Ser­vice provider sup­ports.   For Com­cast, the fol­low­ing modem is supported:

Motorola SB6120 SURFboard

Shop­ping for your equipment !

Inter­net Modems are avail­able from a num­ber of retail out­lets / online stores.    It doesn’t mat­ter the source or where you pur­chase the modem, although you might expe­ri­ence more favor­able return / exchange poli­cies using a local retailer should some­thing go wrong.

And while it is rare to see these modem’s go on sale, you can usu­ally find a retail­ers dis­count coupons some­where on the internet.

What is involved in the actual upgrade?

Once you have the modem in hand, the instal­la­tion / replace­ment is rather straight­for­ward.   Before you start the upgrade. you should con­sider get­ting a base­line of how fast your con­nec­tion is with the cur­rent modem you are using.    The speed of your con­nec­tion can be obtained fol­low­ing these steps:

1. Open a browser (such as Inter­net Explorer) and visit  http://speedtest.net/
2. Click on the but­ton that says “Begin Test”
3. When the test fin­ishes, record the speeds in the Down­load Speed / Upload Speed boxes.

Once you have your base­line speeds, you can then move on to the installation:

1. Con­tact your inter­net ser­vice providers tech­ni­cal sup­port and tell them you are ready to replace your cable modem
2. They will ask for spe­cific infor­ma­tion about the modem (its usu­ally on a label attached to the bot­tom / side of the modem)
3. The tech­ni­cal sup­port per­son will ask  you to turn off the cable modem.   This means you will dis­con­nect the wires attached to the modem (there is no need to mark these cables — there is only 1 way for them to be attached)
4. You then con­nect the wires to the new modem (the plugs are not inter­change­able — there is only one pos­si­ble con­nec­tion for each wire)
5. If you are using a router, you will be asked to turn that off dur­ing the replace­ment process (it gets turned back on after the new modem is up and running)

Once the inter­net con­nec­tion has been re-established, you can go back to  speedtest.net and re-run the speed test.   Just remem­ber the num­bers being reported will almost ALWAYS be dif­fer­ent — the pur­pose of this step is to make sure the val­ues are approx­i­mately the same as before)

What else do you need to consider?

While the upgrade process is rel­a­tively straight­for­ward, some things to remember:

1. If your inter­net modem stops work­ing YOU are respon­si­ble for get­ting a replace­ment. (The modem does come with a 2 year lim­ited war­ranty — odds of it fail­ing should be very low)
2. If your inter­net modem is NOT plugged into a surge pro­tec­tor — you should do so ASAP (power surges do bad things to electronics)
3. If you do not return the modem back to your Inter­net Ser­vice providers, you will con­tinue to see the $7 monthly rental charge
4. Expect to see a form let­ter from your car­rier once you stop the “rental” about how your modem may not pro­vide you with the same speeds/functionality.   You can ignore this letter

And save the old modem for a few days.   If for some rea­son you expe­ri­ence prob­lems (or just aren’t happy) you can always switch back.

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