Friday, November 1, 2019

Review: Motorola 24x8 MB7621 Cable Modem

For the past 6 years, I have been using the Motorola/Arris SURFboard SB6141 Cable Modem for Comcast Xfinity service in the San Jose area. The modem worked fine until I recently tried to upgrade my Asus RT-AC66U Router to Asus RT-AC88U. During this time, the SB6141 would not connect to Xfinity for multiple hours.


When I logged into the Xfinity website, I learned that the SB6141 was no longer supported by Comcast. I decided to upgrade to a supported version. After researching online, I read an interesting article in the Wirecutter regarding cable modems. The Motorola MB7621 24x8 DOCSIS3.0 was highly recommended. I decided to purchase it on Amazon.com.

The installation of the new Motorola MB7621 was relatively straightforward. After disconnecting my previous modem, I reconnected the power, coaxial, and ethernet cables to the new modem.

Comcast requires all cable modems to be registered. To do so, I entered the website https://www.motorola.com and was immediately redirected to Comcast's registration page. I logged into my Comcast account and wrote the new Cable modem.

In terms of performance, I did not measure any significant improvement in download or upload speeds or access latency.

My speedtest.com showed the following results:
  • Protocol: IPv4
  • Download Speed: 63.5 Mbps
  • Upload Speed: 3.7 Mbps
  • Access Ping: 11ms

One significant improvement I noticed was the speed with which the new Cable modem connected to Xfinity. It was much faster than the older SB6141.



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