Replacement for Arris tg862g router...

Status
Not open for further replies.
Joined
Apr 11, 2004
Messages
4,005
Location
los angeles
A friend of mine is renting this router from his cable co. I told him that he could just buy one and stop paying monthly fees. What's a good replacement for this router? No fancy ones, as he barely even checks emails or surfs web,much less sees videos or d/l's
 
To be clear, that is a combo cable modem + wifi router. My advice is to get a standalone DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem and a standalone wireless router. All-in-one devices are not a great choice, generally speaking.

For the modem, he should check with his cable company to see which bring-your-own models are supported. The safe bets would be a Motorola Surfboard 6141 or Cisco/Linksys DPC3008. You can get them used on eBay for about $40-50.

As for wireless routers, there's a million to choose from. As long as he doesn't have some unique situation (enormous house or very noisy area), most off-the-shelf 802.11n routers would work fine. $50-80 would be about right.
 
check with the cable provider. mine provides a list of approved devices. the list was very long. I ended up with a motorola surfboard that was docsis 3.0. ditto on the separate devices for phone and modem
 
Originally Posted By: dparm
My advice is to get a standalone DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem and a standalone wireless router. All-in-one devices are not a great choice, generally speaking.

+1.

Originally Posted By: dparm
As for wireless routers, there's a million to choose from. As long as he doesn't have some unique situation (enormous house or very noisy area), most off-the-shelf 802.11n routers would work fine. $50-80 would be about right.

Going off of what he has mentioned his friend does, a cheapy $40 Linksys will do just fine. Stick to a Linksys or even a cheaper DLink for setup simplicity. These are both pretty much dummy proof on their cheaper versions and will last a long time. Any G/N will suffice.
 
I have a lot of technician friends still at time Warner and they swear by Motorola modems for reliability, and would never touch a zoom modem. Just my 2c
 
I've never had any luck with these combo boxes... you ask one box to do too many things at once (modem, router, AP), and its CPU and/or memory eventually get overloaded and you start seeing performance degradation, especially if you have heavy users in the house.

BTW, I was just notified by Comcast that they've upped my speed from 25 Mbps to 50. Time to finally buy that DOCSIS 3.0 modem... I just ordered the Motorola SB6141. The SB6121 would have sufficed, but since the price difference isn't all that much, I figured the SB6141 is a little more future proof.
 
definitely the 6141 is easily good to 100mbit

the 6121 is theoretically but time warner says only upto 50mbit

anything faster you need a 6141 (or other approved docsis 3 modem)
 
Originally Posted By: Rand
definitely the 6141 is easily good to 100mbit

The spec sheet says it's good up to 343 Mbps. Is that not realistic?
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
Originally Posted By: Rand
definitely the 6141 is easily good to 100mbit

The spec sheet says it's good up to 343 Mbps. Is that not realistic?



Time Warner will not allow it to be used for faster than 100mbps service. They require an 16 channel modem for the higher tiers. If I were to guess, this is for load balancing purposes, spread the load across more DOCSIS channels.
 
Originally Posted By: Nick R


Time Warner will not allow it to be used for faster than 100mbps service. They require an 16 channel modem for the higher tiers. If I were to guess, this is for load balancing purposes, spread the load across more DOCSIS channels.


yep.. thats where I was going.. if I had to take a wild stab at the reason.

same reason they only approve the 6121 to 50mbit
even though its capable of over 150mbit.. in a laboratory (has 4 channels)
 
Last edited:
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
BTW, it looks like Comcast allows the SB6141 to be used for their fastest tier which is 150 Mbps currently.


If I were to take another wild stab, it seems they've pegged 50% utilization as the max they want to allow. For example, when I was there, a D3 modem was highly recommended (though not required, at first. Later on all new customers with Turbo were given D3 modems). Single channel is good for about 38mbps theoretically. 15 is less than 50%, so standard is fine on a D2 modem. But turbo is 20, which is over 50% of 38. Same thing with higher tiers. In "MAXX" areas, turbo is 100, which is the maximum they'll allow on a 8 channel SB6141. The next step is 200, which is again, more than 50% of that theoretical 350mbps max.

Same thing again with the 6141, the max they allow it's use for is the 50mbps. They don't allow it for use with the 100mbps service- again more than 50%.

I can't confirm this, but I am taking a guess that 50% or less of maximum theoretical capacity is what they are aiming for.
 
^ no need to guess, they have a webpage where you can see approved modems and filter them by speed tier
 
Originally Posted By: Quattro Pete
I just ordered the Motorola SB6141.

Blah... got the modem, but apparently some Comcast system responsible for activations is experiencing issues, so they can't turn it up for me.

Other than that, pleasantly surprised with how small this box is. I was expecting one of those big Motorola boxes circa 2005.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top