yoshimato's Full Review: Motorola SURFboard SB4200 Cable Modem
I should have brought my own cable modem a long time ago. But first it's the modem standards issue, and then the @Home shut down saga. Now is the time since even Cox has a list of supported modems on their site. If they don't have that, I would hesitate very much to call them up and ask – a question is a question after all.
The cable modem standard
The minimum requirement or the worst you can get is DOCSIS 1.0. The latest is DOCSIS 1.1. DOCSIS 2.0 is on the drawing board. Of all the modems in the class, only the Surfboard is software upgradeable to 1.1 (from 1.0). The other is the Toshiba in the same price range, which says DOCSIS 1.1 out right. However, I checked the official list of approvals, the Surfboard is certified to 1.1 while the Toshiba model in question is NOT! I checked the Toshiba website and they didn't claim that either. Although I prefer something 1.1 rather than software upgradeable to 1.1, I think this is the one to get.
DOCSIS 1.1 is no big deal. It's for establishing some more intimate communications between your modem and your ISP, such as link quality control etc. I'm no expert but that's something useful for ISP to deliver new services such as real time video and audio. I'm certain that you don't need it or you won't get it for basic ISP connection, and for sometime to come. Software upgradeable is appropriate since when your ISP wants to provide it (and charge for it), it can do it through sending software to your modem and upgrade at an instant.
There some advantages of older standards. Its easy to descramble analogue cable TV, disable region control on older APEX DVD player models. In cable modem there is uncapping, which allows transfer speed to go over that you paid for.
The speed
I think the speed of all modems are the same. The reason being that in the standard the modulation schemes are specified and hence the maximum data speed are the same. I checked the speed of several modems and they are basically the same. The figures are not exactly the same but I think some round off is applied to claim a higher speed. Though it is possible that the fastest modulation schemes are not supported in a modem, but that's unlikely. Overall, it's the same situation as analog modem, if it's V90 its as fast as any V90 but can slow down to cope with your noisy line.
The Surfboard has USB (1.0 or 1.1, they didn't say) and Ethernet (100 Mb/s) connection. Actually you can use both at the same time for 2 computers, which is a nice feature. Now I gave you some correct figures. USB 1 is rated at 12 Mb/s. Ethernet has two rates 10 or 100 Mb/s. USB 2.0 is somewhat higher at 480 Mb/s. Apple firewire or (IEEE1394) for camcorders has 400 Mb/s. But that's the spec, the devices can operate at lower speeds, or that the spec has several lower speeds. I tried both USB and Ethernet 100 Mb/s. Both the downlink speed and the uplink speed. The speed is not usually noticeable. So the bottleneck is the Internet itself, and the shared traffic between your whole neighborhood and your ISP.
I looked at windows network settings. The USB connection reported 1 Mb/s rate, and the Ethernet reported 10 Mb/s rate and also 100 Mb/s rate. This may not mean much since I know the Ethernet is auto sense, and the other connections are probably the same. The time I saw the 10 Mb/s Ethernet it wasn't working, while when I saw 1Mb/s USB the modem is working. Anyway now the Ethernet is working at 100 Mb/s.
I did some speed test. Cox is right calling theirs high speed internet. The download speed is consistantly well over 2Mb/s (1 use bits throughtout, divide by 8 to get byte). I don't know why, but most speed meters expect 1.5 Mb/s for cable. According to AnalogX's meter, the short term average speed is sometimes over 3 Mb/s, which is the max that Cox claims. The upload is limited to 256 Kb/s, which is the max that Cox claims.
That means the speed of the modem is sufficient that I get the full bandwidth from my ISP. Many cable and DSL ISP are slower than this. The 12 Mb/s USB connection is probably just OK to use for one computer. If you have a home network, you need 100 Mb/s Ethernet. Now that many new motherboard supports 480 Mb/s USB, I think future modems would support it also, doing away with Ethernet altogether. Now you can have a pure USB 1 network but probably not fast enough.
I have a secure link between my work PC and my home PC for months using Ethernet, so I'm using both the uplink and downlink, including transferring large files between the two sites. Reluctantly, I tried the USB connection at home for a while and it doesn't feel much different. It shouldn't because a outgoing file from my home PC can only be 256 Kb/s max. I surf at work at over 10 Mb/s, but I often surf via my home PC as a proxy. That means I often surf at 256 Kb/s, 10 times that of a 28.8 modem? That doesn't feel that slow and I have all the privacy to myself. Though in busy hours when downloading large files, I download directly at work. Any servers couldn't provide that 10 Mb/s sort of speed, but it helps with a faster download link.
The box
I always prefer a internal card rather than an external modem. And that an internal card usually cost less because you have to take the trouble to open the modem. The only internal one supported by Cox is Zoom. It's not that widely available and hence the price isn't that attractive, and it's not 1.1 upgradeable. It makes sense if the modem card is integrated with an Ethernet card so you need only one card. Otherwise its the same as an external box but you insert the box inside instead. The possible problem with an integrated card is that you may not be able to network more than one computer. I have an Ethernet card already and I went for low price.
The surfboard isn't as big as it looks. The Toshiba looks tiny but the surfboard is already small. It can sit upright or flat down. My dislike with small external boxes is that it too light to hold the cable securely. But there's no neat way except to nail the box or the cable, and all modems are the same.
There are four lights, power, transmit, receive, ready plus activity and standby. I found out that they don't lie to you. There's a button for the standby mode, which is an unusual feature amongst modems. Your PC is isolated from the network until you switch off the standby mode. It makes you feel better. When you are not using the Internet but the activity keeps on blinking all the time, you just feel better to go into standby. Most of these activities should be via your ISP and programs like messenger, and lot of software with auto update from the net. However, there are also a lot of kids using ready made scripts to scan your computer.
If you are the sort of person looking for a power off switch, you will be disappointed. Nowadays the cost of a mechanism switch, especially power switch, will buy you a lot of functions in silicon. If they provide you a power switch, they have to rely on you to use it responsibly. Frequent power on and off is not good for electronics in general. The AC/DC adapter is internal to the Surfboard. But some devices got external AC/DC adapters, and there's no point to switch off these devices when the adapter is connected since the most power inefficient part is the adapter. I suspect that the Energy Star rating of some devices don't count the adapter. I hate separate adapters near the plug because the whole thing is a nightmare in tight spaces during power installation. Anyway a separate adapter allows the manufacturer to concentrate on the high tech part and buy the adapter from cheap low tech manufacturers.
The only reason you want a switch is to save power. Nowadays electronics are power efficient. The power consumption varies with the speed of the data going through it. With power saving circuity, typical devices consumes very little power when idle. It's not a TV after all! Actually I prefer something without a power switch, with a Energy Star rating. That means it's OK to leave it on and feel good about it. It's normally always cost you less overall if you leave these things on, but with Energy Star you feel better about the environment.
There are lots of venting gaps in the box to let the heat out. So an external box would be preferred. It's not wise to have such a heat generator within the PC.
The installation
In dealing with networks, cable support in general and Cox in particular, I was very careful not to take any chances. It looks like that you upgrade your modem first and then call your ISP to give them the MAC number of your modem. I'm not sure but I don't think it's wise to call Cox first and ask. So I go ahead following Motorola's instruction.
There's no paper manual in the retail box. I was very hesitated to load the CD because of XP. Most of the time when you install drivers you can easily get into some infinite loop or hen-versus-egg problems. However, this CD should set the standard. It's way easier to follow the pictures and instructions in the CD then some huge quick installation sheets.
The CD shows you step by step connections, with photos of the various connectors. Tell you what equipment you need if you share the cable outlet with TV. And tell you not to connect the modem to the USB port initially. I'm surprised that many USB device tell you not to connect to the USB port before installing the software. But it's so simple to avoid this. I'm not sure the Surfboard CD is failsafe, but at least I think you can load the CD anytime, connected or not. Then the CD will tell you to disconnect it first.
The only fault I can pick is that the CD is more like a CEO presentation, with slides sliding across the screen, while plain pictures or even line drawings will do. I began to wonder why we are paying so much for a computer. The concept of simputers is a nice one. A lot of people are fed up with overly complicated and overly priced computers. A 2.0 GHz P4 for home use is way over the top. 'Business' class computers has long been cut down versions of home computers. If you don't do multi media at work, you don't really need that power. But even if you are a gamer, a play station is only around $300 with much better graphics, with DVD player included.
I remembered the 486 days when the graphics interface is matured. It's not getting much better nowadays. Then the speed of word processing is lightning fast. Even the loading of windows, loading of the word processing package is lightning fast. Editing, loading and saving documents are lightning fast. Then Microsoft made you wait a few seconds to load windows, and to load Office, which are often unofficial bench marks to see how fast your computer is. A file is at least a megabyte even if I have a few words in it! Oh yes, it's easy to use but full of rubbish that you probably don't use for the rest of your life. Now since I think most people are fed up with the low level intelligence of the animated paper clip, can we be spared and pay what we only need? A P4 home computer with AGP graphics is on par with professional workstations that used to be and still is expensive, costing thousands of dollars. Someone something somehow must give way to something else.
Back to the installation. There's not much of an installation since you only install the USB driver if you use it. The presentation shows you how to connect all the wires and the Ethernet card if you haven't got one yet. You can even uninstall the USB driver via the CD which is convenient. You want to do that sooner or later, the Ethernet is 10 times faster though that's not the bottleneck.
The modem come labeled with the MAC number, and several extra labels with the MAC number. At the end, the CD tells you to call the ISP to give them your MAC number. I'm a bit disappointed as I have to call Cox afterall.
It's good when you are a new customer. They come over and sort out everything. I heard that someone got their windows upgraded free of charge. But because my computer has ISA at the time, they slip in an ISA Ethernet card. When my main computer was down, the spare computer with it's own Ethernet card didn't cause any problems. When I upgraded, I can't use the ISA card anymore. I got a PCI card and there wasn't any problems. I never had to call.
And so I called this time. The guy doesn't seem to understand in a sentence that I installed my modem already and want to give him my MAC number. He was expecting to tell me what should I do when I decided to buy my own modem, something like that. After he realized that I already installed the modem, he said that my modem will work in less than 15 mins. That's true and sooner than that. I didn't know why but I was so confident that I told the guy to get the modem back right on the phone. 'Tomorrow?', wow that was quick. But they are always eager to get back boxes in short supply – analog boxes are limited to one, if they have more digital boxes they can serve new customers faster, and everybody is renting modems for at least the first month. At least that was the old days.
My problems
My problem belongs to the hardware software conflict category in the support talk, that means I don't know. After weeks of happy use there was no connection. I waited a day and hoped that it was just outage. But it wasn't. After a nasty talk with Cox support, he was quite sure that there was no problem between the modem and Cox. The problem is between my modem and my computer.
I was very disappointed. That never happened before in the history of my cable modem. Though I had a big problem with my new graphics card, also happily in normal service for weeks. But one day XP complains that the card didn't complete some drawing functions as instructed, and crashed. I tried an earlier driver and everything is OK. I think I revert to the new driver (or not) and there wasn't any problem, until some days later, the same crash occurred. I tried different things and the card seems to be working perfectly till now. But not my cable modem.
I was desperate. The Cox guy said that it's not their problem. I already returned the rental modem and I can't verify that. The thing with networking is that you don't usually have a spare modem, a spare computer or even a spare network to verify simple things. But then I thought of the USB connection. I was really desperate and installed it. Surprise surprise it worked. I installed the Ethernet again and it didn't work. I reinstalled the USB and it worked. It must be the Ethernet, but still that could be the modem, the Ethernet card, or my motherboard. But then it can also be a simple wrong setting in XP. The speed doesn't seem to be a big problem.
One day I forget to bring along a spare Ethernet card to swap. But since I opened the box to reinstall my old fan, I changed the PCI slot of the current card. The fan was big at 5 in, wasn't noisy but the wind blowing on the motherboard make noise stronger than my quiet hard drive. I disabled the USB network and reinstalled the Ethernet network. It worked! The conclusion is obvious but I don't think you can easily damage the PCI slots. I think there may be some contact problems due to overheat.
Just in case I'm now working on the wake-on-LAN feature of my Ethernet card and my Asus motherboard. Then I can put the PC to standby cool state until I need it in my office, via sending a magic packet. I found out that they both support WOL and are PCI2.2 compliant so you don't need a jumper wire to enable WOL.
Now I give you some idea of how nasty the Cox support can be, but that's not limited to Cox, but support in general, depending on the time and day. Don't read on if you don't want to. The only time the cable has problem is when they change from static IP to dynamic IP. That was probably when the numbers of users starting to grow fast. There weren't any problems until one day. I was wrong to send my wife as the first move. I hope to get rid of some stupid opening moves such as 'turn on the power to the computer'. And then if there's something they can't sort out, I will call to continue. That was a wrong move. When I called it was a very bad start.
I thing they have several levels of support. At times like the @Home shut down they give you a moron for a start. If they can't sort it out for 10 min, they give you a lesser moron after that. And a lessor moron after that. The chance that you can resolve a non-trivial problem at first attempt is nil.
When I called, the guy is already wielding a gun, ready to shoot me because I installed a firewall and my wife didn't know anything about it when she called. They won't deviate from the procedure, and read from ready made scripts. For example, they will remind you to turn on your PC every time you called, something like that. Of course I was prepared this time, when he opened with 'turn on the switch', I countered with something like, my main switch is on and I have electricity to my home, I'm sitting on a comfortable chair and holding a cup of coffee. So he was clever not to mention the firewall thing, otherwise I would give him a list of the log that kids are scanning my computer and I want to sue Cox because they don't do anything about it. It's a very common thing. I told him I was already in the networking tab ready to change the settings. But he had nothing of it. He began by telling me to get to the start button / my computer, a few clicks and then to the same place I was already in. I was then told to change the static IP to dynamic IP. I said 'so you changed from static to dynamic IP.' 'Yes,' he said. But that was my first question when I called. Luckily that was the only ever problem, until now.
This time I was just wanting to ask whether they have any outage, and if not can they test whether it's the problem the modem and Cox, or between the modem and my computer. Of course things don't get this simple with Cox. I tried to please him. I opened with that I used the Cox monitor software installed on my computer and it reported that it didn't get any response from the ISP server. But he was not pleased. He dared to tell me to run Internet Explorer and then tell him what I get. Of course I didn't get anything, stupid. He knew that the connection between Cox and my modem is OK. But he didn't tell me that. He was looking for excuses to blame my computer so I can't deny. But I am a very reasonable person. Along the way he told me close all programs, which is an impossibility. I know all the little icons on the right side of the task bar are running, but I have 20 of them. Some are reluctant to be closed. Furthermore, some are installed as system services. You have to go to the task manager to stop those. If you have to stop those, than why not turn off all the system services? Then the computer wouldn't work at all.
Then he picked on my antivirus software. I tried to skip over this as I have been using it as long as my computer and now I turned off at least part of it, and the other part belongs to the impossibility category. But he wouldn't let go. He ask me what it is. It's AVG, a free one. AVG stands for AVG but he asked me to open it and tell him what AVG is. That's AVG! He sort of asked me why its there. Because it's free and recommended. He then became nasty and humorous – recommended by who? It was tested my one of the popular magazine and that it sometimes detect more virus than the popular ones. But who would think of explaining all these things at the time? I stressed the free part and that it doesn't matter if I have virus. I never got it and if I get it I'll throw away the hard disk.
Now he was getting there. He told me that it's normal between the modem and his side as the modem responded to him normally. He told me it's my computer and I have to talk to the manufacturer. 'You are talking to the manufacturer', I got him on that as I built the PC myself. He recommended me to roll back the system. But I refused because that would go back to the time when the graphics card crash the system. And I don't believe in roll back. In my case if I reinstall the modem and it doesn't work, it won't work if I restore back to that state when the modem is installed. Anyway he recommended to restore the system to the time before the graphics card crash. Before I hang up I said I'll try anyway and call them back. But he closed the door by saying that there's no need to since it's not their problem. I tried restore and of course it didn't work But I did think of trying the USB and proved that the ISP connection is working. The sure thing is that I don't need to call Cox again.
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