About Arris Modem.. is this good?

[bobby23]

I'm interesting with ARRIS on amazon, I've read many reviews, but I still not satisfied with it. This is new for me
Anyone can give me more reviews?
I saw it here http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004XC6GJ0/?tag=snbforums-20
and also need an advise
thanks

 

[stevech]

Not same model, but I have an Arris DOCSIS 3 modem and an Arris modem with digital phone (TimeWarner). I rent by choice and they charge me only for one.

Opinion: Arris has long bee selling top quality well tested modems to cable TV operators. They didn't used to sell any via retail.

As long as you don't buy some cheaped-up Arris for retail, you'll be OK. Of course the make/model you buy MUST be on your provider's approved product list or they won't provision it for use.

the link you showed to a $65 version co-branded with Motorola gives me pause - that is branding and the Arris quality isn't there. I could be wrong. Motorola's cable modem line came via their acquisition of General Instrument some years back. I don't think they've acquired Arris. I think it's a cheaped-up one from Asia for consumer-direct retail. Might be OK.

this is what I have - but without the Motorola logo
http://www.arrisi.com/products/product.asp?id=925
look at Arris's web site.

 

[sfx2000]

I'll have to dig around a bit, but if I recall, Arris bought Moto's CM business a while back.

https://www.arrisi.com/special/learn_more/arris.asp

sfx

 

[stevech]

Digital phone

I tried 3 or 4 VoIP providers - ones that give you an ATA box (analog telephone adapter) and you connect that ethernet to your LAN. Except for one which put their ATA ahead of your router and tried to double-NAT to have priority. That was a mess. The others' had port open issues, SIP issues, bearer port issues. failed attempts at trying to use router QoS, etc. All in all, it was absurd.

None of the VoIP providers were acceptable.
Lots of outages
Lots of call routing failures (their choice of too cheap carriers)
Silly-bad voice quality
Too many I can't hear you calls.

So I changed to TimeWarner's digital phone. More costly (National unlimited) than these VoIP providers, but half the cost of evil AT&T's landline.

The TW digital phone has been as good or better than AT&T's overpriced landline. Probably because the modem has digital voice on a different data frame scheduler that the Internet data uses (the DOCSIS scheduler). And TW does not use flaky carriers for call completion/long distance. The TW service is $30/mo in the bundle.

 

[Smartacus]

I have TWC as well, but got tired of using their DOCSIS 3.0 wireless modem/router (SB6580). I still use their EMTA for my VOIP phone service.
We recently got the new 100/5 upgrade and Dallas is about to get the 300 bump so I chose the SB6183 as I got it for the same price as the list price of the model you were looking at. But look at the price difference at Amazon compared to Best Buy. I actually bought the SB6141 at first and took it back when I saw the 6183 was only 20.00 more and got lucky when the woman working customer service gave me a price match with the 6141. So for 2.13 more (under 100.00) I got the upgrade and have been pleased with the product. I paired it with the AC87R and couldn't be happier.

http://www.amazon.com/ARRIS-Motorola-SurfBoard-SB6183-DOCSIS/dp/B00MA5U1FW/ref=sr_1_1?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1421056597&sr=1-1&keywords=arris+6183

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/searchpage.jsp?st=arris+6183&_dyncharset=UTF-8&id=pcat17071&type=page&sc=Global&cp=1&nrp=15&sp=&qp=&list=n&iht=y&usc=All+Categories&ks=960&keys=keys

 

[stevech]

100/5 in Dallas from TWC.

I wish I could show my San Diego TWC that their brothers are selling more for the same as we pay in this region. Each region seems to be a different profit center so each can make up it's own prices.

I think my 30/5 is $45 in the bundle.

PS: If Moto sold Arris, who owns it now? Why are boxes still logo'd with moto? Or did this split customer premises products from infrastructure products (the latter is Arris' forte').

 

[AdvHomeServer]

I've used a Motorola / Arris SB6121 for nearly 3 years with no problems. I don't understand the emotionalism about this product. Go 1 model higher if you think you will ever get +100Mbit speeds, just for capacity margin. I own mine, from Amazon. To me, it's like getting excited over 1 brand of microwave compared to another.

 

[sfx2000]

I've used a Motorola / Arris SB6121 for nearly 3 years with no problems. I don't understand the emotionalism about this product. Go 1 model higher if you think you will ever get +100Mbit speeds, just for capacity margin. I own mine, from Amazon. To me, it's like getting excited over 1 brand of microwave compared to another.

Concur - the Arris/Moto CM's are fairly decent - I've got a SB6141 and it's been fine... This is a 60Mb downlink, and it's ok...

I have to chuckle a bit - consider where we were a few years back... 60Mb is just ok

To the OP - consider just buying a modem rather than an all-in-one CM Gateway device - your needs will likely change over time..

 

[Smartacus]

I just hope that Google Fiber gets to Dallas soon. They offer a 1Gb up and down speed for 70.00.


https://fiber.google.com/cities/austin/plans/#plan=gigabit-tv

 

[jegesq]

Arris IS Motorola now. So that should not be an issue.

Arris is the standard among cable modems at the moment. I would not purchase the device that you're looking at on Amazon, for several reason, but the most important is that it's largely obsolete, and only capable of bonding 4 channels down and 4 channels up, which means that it's only capable of achieving about 85-90 Mbps download. Even though it's theoretical maximum is 175, it can't actually achieve that in the real world.

If I were you, I'd either get a SB6143 which is 8x4 and which will support speeds as high as 150 Mbps down, or better yet, get the SB6183 which is capable of fully supporting 300Mbps is a 16x4 device.

Like Smartacus, I'm with TWC and we recently were provisioned for 300 down and 20 up, so I bought an Arris Motorola SB6183. I was originally using the Arris DG1670A provided by TWC, but I bought into the concept that I needed a separate cable modem.

Truth be told, I probably would have been just as happy using the Arris DG1670A and setting it up in Bridge mode and turning off NAT, turning off wireless and turning off firewall. But I went instead with the 6183, and am getting really great performance. If I was still leasing a modem from TWC I'd be paying about $9-10 per month so in about 14 months, I'd have spent the same amount I paid for my SB6183 from Best Buy. But conversely in 1.5 to 2 years there will probably be some newer, better cable modem coming out, which will make the SB6183 obsolete (or at least one or two generations behind the newest stuff)....so in this case, renting may actually make more sense, because TWC will just allow you to swap an older modem for a new one with no additional charges. Bottom line though is either way you're going to pay for a modem, so get one that is at least as fully capable as possible. And that is not a 4x4 modem.

 

[jegesq]

PS: If Moto sold Arris, who owns it now? Why are boxes still logo'd with moto? Or did this split customer premises products from infrastructure products (the latter is Arris' forte').

Moto didn't sell Arris. It was the other way around: Arris bought the cable modem business -- Motorola Mobility's Home Division-- in 2013 from Google, which had acquired all of Motorola Mobility about two years earlier. Thus, technically, Motorola Home was sold by Google to Arris, which now owns it, and Arris therefore has the rights to use the names, logos and IP of the Motorola Home Division on its products. This of course includes all of the Moto SB cable modems. Arris didn't buy the phone division of Motorola which is still owned by Google.

This is why all of the newer stuff is labled "Arris" and it's why the support pages even for cable modems branded "Motorola" (basically the entire SB Surfboard line of products) is now found on the Arris support pages.

See: ARRIS Acquires Motorola Home: Creates Premier Video Delivery and Broadband Technology Company
Powerful Combination Transforms Industry, Accelerates Innovation - April 17, 2013

"Motorola" in its present form isn't just a single company. The old, original Motorola is technically defunct, and the company has been split up into many pieces, with the top two that most consumers are familiar with now being owned by Google (phones, handsets, tablet devices), and by Arris (mostly modems). There's another "Motorola" which uses only the blue logo that is involved in making products mostly for law enforcement.

For a more in depth history see this portion of the Motorola article at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola#Split

 

[stevech]

Arris built top quality infrastructure gear.
Motorola got into set top boxes and cable modems and MoCA from their years-ago acquisition of General Instruments as I recall.

Opinion: Motorola is another sad case of a pioneering American tech company that has been ravished by the greed of Wall Street leading to the all too common Rent-a-CEO and that to random course changes. As happened to HP and others.

 

[AdvHomeServer]

Arris built top quality infrastructure gear.
Motorola got into set top boxes and cable modems and MoCA from their years-ago acquisition of General Instruments as I recall.

Opinion: Motorola is another sad case of a pioneering American tech company that has been ravished by the greed of Wall Street leading to the all too common Rent-a-CEO and that to random course changes. As happened to HP and others.

Motorola died because it was captured by the Six Sigma bureaucracy. Quality became such an obsession it completely destroyed innovation. The benefits of innovation couldn't be quantified using Six Sigma prior to having the inspirational flash that usually accompanies innovation. It just died, even though Six Sigma has an approved process for getting innovation through the proper channels (I think they called it DSSS or something similar ... I vaguely remember it but disrespect it so strongly I don't care to even look up the correct abbreviation.)

Management wan't greedy. Just rather stupid. They built a massive factory in a small town served by no major roads, selecting it because the CEO had family connections there, then built analog phones there. See Six Sigma rant for how well that turned out. The factory shut down after a few years and was sold for maybe 10 cents on the dollar about a decade later. (The successful clam shell analog phone was designed later as a skunkworks project at a different plant. Few people knew about it until after it was ready to go. I don't remember if the plant that was shut down got to assemble a few before it was closed.)

Thus, in my opinion, the root cause of Motorola's business failure was Six Sigma quality obsession to the point that innovation in a competitive market that demanded free flowing creativity was destroyed. There's nothing wrong with organized quality efforts. There's everything wrong with putting the least imaginative people at the company in charge of it, while none of them are individually accountable because they are just defending the process. In the case of an office bully, Six Sigma is ideal because if you stand up to one, you're portrayed as being disloyal and against quality. Management is predisposed to accept that view since Six Sigma requires a strong management buy-in to succeed and criticism of the process is criticism of Management. In my opinion.

 

[stevech]

Well, I didn't like 6-Sigma either, but I thought it was just the every-decade new QA campaign. Remember "Zero Defects"?

I watched Moto morph from a great radio company to one trying to puff up dividends and shareholder returns by getting into the cellular handset (phone) biz. That was the big mistake. Too competitive. Margins too small.

HP did the same when they went into printers and PCs.

Doesn't take a genius to see what would become of these kinds of companies with superb legacies abandoned in search of quarter-to-quarter profits.

I again say the root cause of these is that the CEOs are NOT employees. That should be illegal. They are contractors with incentive bonuses set by the greedy board members - who are all wealthy people themselves with no skin in the game.

 

[AdvHomeServer]

Well, I didn't like 6-Sigma either, but I thought it was just the every-decade new QA campaign. Remember "Zero Defects"?

I again say the root cause of these is that the CEOs are NOT employees. That should be illegal. They are contractors with incentive bonuses set by the greedy board members - who are all wealthy people themselves with no skin in the game.

There was a time when I thought Six Sigma was great and even wanted to learn it. Then, to me, it looked to be as much of cult as a quality initiative. Quality is good. Systems that support quality are good. Turning the company over to the quality people, directly or indirectly, is a good way to kill it as it will kill creativity.

Don't get me started on corporate greed. This is a computer blog, not a securities fraud web site. Agree about greed in the executive suite at a lot of large companies. Also I think you might be confusing stupidity with greed in a lot of cases. In my old consulting days, I ran into a lot of good people and many of the most obnoxious and idiotic managers and staff you will ever meet. Stupidity and bullying were firmly integrated into the corporate culture at their companies. Or, they knew how to work the system. Don't get me started on them, either. Wrong blog for that, too.