Question GB Cable Modem and WiFi 6e Wireless Router Recommendations?

Aug 7, 2022
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Spouse just signed us up fo 1 GB service. So we are now in the market for a new GB modem and WiFi 6e Wireless Router. We live in an L shaped home; where the cable access point is at the shorter part of the "L" where the living room, tv, 3 laptops, and stereo system is located. The original part of the home (the longer part of the "L") is made of brick - and get maybe 2.4Mbps at the furthest 2 Bedrooms away from the current location of our cable modem and wireless router. There is 1 brick wall plus 2 walls for wireless signals to travel thru to the furthest bedroom. I am getting 480 Mbps from my cell (galaxy 21FE) and 560 Mbps on my laptop; which are about 20 feet from the wireless router.

Xfinity/comcast is our internet provider.

Do you all have any recommendations? I was looking at the Motorola MB 8600 or MB 8611 for a cable modem, and a TP-Link AXE5400 router?

Do you all have any recommendations? I would prefer to keep the purchase below $225ish.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
 

kanewolf

Titan
Moderator
Spouse just signed us up fo 1 GB service. So we are now in the market for a new GB modem and WiFi 6e Wireless Router. We live in an L shaped home; where the cable access point is at the shorter part of the "L" where the living room, tv, 3 laptops, and stereo system is located. The original part of the home (the longer part of the "L") is made of brick - and get maybe 2.4Mbps at the furthest 2 Bedrooms away from the current location of our cable modem and wireless router. There is 1 brick wall plus 2 walls for wireless signals to travel thru to the furthest bedroom. I am getting 480 Mbps from my cell (galaxy 21FE) and 560 Mbps on my laptop; which are about 20 feet from the wireless router.

Xfinity/comcast is our internet provider.

Do you all have any recommendations? I was looking at the Motorola MB 8600 or MB 8611 for a cable modem, and a TP-Link AXE5400 router?

Do you all have any recommendations? I would prefer to keep the purchase below $225ish.

Thanks in advance for your suggestions.
Your ISP will have a list of supported modems for the tier of service you have chosen. You need to pick from that list.
6E routers are still fairly new and fairly expensive. For example all the Asus routers with 6Ghz (6E) support are $350 or more.
 
On the cable modem the most important consideration is that it is on the list of modems the ISP supports for your house. Sometime they support some modems only is certain areas.

The ISP is responsible for firmware updates and support of the modem even when you purchase it which is why they don't just allow any modem. If both are on the list then it is up to you I guess. It seems the main difference is one has a 2.5g port which will make no difference until you buy a plan faster then 1gbit from the ISP.

Routers are hard to say. There is not a lot of good information about wifi6e from real end users. You see the common fake/paid review sites and the end users bragging about their "number" size.

In general wifi6e should be a better performer because there is so much radio bandwidth that it reduces the competition between nieghbors, unlike wifi6 that there really is only 1 160mhz block to share and it can be disrupted by weather radar in some areas.

What is still unknown is does the 6ghz greatly impact the performance over 5ghz. In theory the signals should be absorbed more. Your house is the perfect example of a bad wifi house. Multiple brick wall will absorb massive amounts of signals.

I dislike mesh routers mostly because it is advertising hype that gets people to pay more for devices than they should. I would not pay extra for a so called "mesh" router.

If you are already getting 500mbps on your current system I would think the wifi6e will be better.......assuming your end devices support wifi6e. That said I seriously doubt we will see gigabit wifi but maybe ?. You have to be careful about looking at speed it generally is only used for downloads which unless you are torrent teen it is a small percentage of your overall use. Most normal stuff uses very little bandwidth and something like a phone does not have enough storage to realistically need to be downloading huge 50gbyte games.

In your case if you want higher speed in the remote most rooms I would look at wired solution. Ethernet is the best and it depends how hard it is to run wires say in the attic or basement. The other technology that can do full 1gbit is MoCA. You would need a coax cable in both rooms.
 
Aug 7, 2022
11
0
10
Your ISP will have a list of supported modems for the tier of service you have chosen. You need to pick from that list.
6E routers are still fairly new and fairly expensive. For example all the Asus routers with 6Ghz (6E) support are $350 or more.
thanks for suggestion, makes sense to me. I thought service provider did that - maybe because they get a kickback by the modem manufacturer....lol :)
 
Aug 7, 2022
11
0
10
On the cable modem the most important consideration is that it is on the list of modems the ISP supports for your house. Sometime they support some modems only is certain areas.

The ISP is responsible for firmware updates and support of the modem even when you purchase it which is why they don't just allow any modem. If both are on the list then it is up to you I guess. It seems the main difference is one has a 2.5g port which will make no difference until you buy a plan faster then 1gbit from the ISP.

Routers are hard to say. There is not a lot of good information about wifi6e from real end users. You see the common fake/paid review sites and the end users bragging about their "number" size.

In general wifi6e should be a better performer because there is so much radio bandwidth that it reduces the competition between nieghbors, unlike wifi6 that there really is only 1 160mhz block to share and it can be disrupted by weather radar in some areas.

What is still unknown is does the 6ghz greatly impact the performance over 5ghz. In theory the signals should be absorbed more. Your house is the perfect example of a bad wifi house. Multiple brick wall will absorb massive amounts of signals.

I dislike mesh routers mostly because it is advertising hype that gets people to pay more for devices than they should. I would not pay extra for a so called "mesh" router.

If you are already getting 500mbps on your current system I would think the wifi6e will be better.......assuming your end devices support wifi6e. That said I seriously doubt we will see gigabit wifi but maybe ?. You have to be careful about looking at speed it generally is only used for downloads which unless you are torrent teen it is a small percentage of your overall use. Most normal stuff uses very little bandwidth and something like a phone does not have enough storage to realistically need to be downloading huge 50gbyte games.

In your case if you want higher speed in the remote most rooms I would look at wired solution. Ethernet is the best and it depends how hard it is to run wires say in the attic or basement. The other technology that can do full 1gbit is MoCA. You would need a coax cable in both rooms.
thanks for your reply. my dilemma was that my wife wants better wifi on the end of the house - as she has converted 1 br into her office/hobby room. I'd like to think that I banished her there for a lil peace and quiet.....lol. That being said; a wired ethernet solution is probably going to be the most realistic option....or just wait for a wifi 6e extender to drop down in price down the line?
 

kanewolf

Titan
Moderator
thanks for your reply. my dilemma was that my wife wants better wifi on the end of the house - as she has converted 1 br into her office/hobby room. I'd like to think that I banished her there for a lil peace and quiet.....lol. That being said; a wired ethernet solution is probably going to be the most realistic option....or just wait for a wifi 6e extender to drop down in price down the line?
If you can easily run ethernet, that will be the best solution. You can have a wired ethernet access point and an ethernet switch to allow all the stationary devices (TV, PC, game console) to be wired. That frees up WIFI for portable devices.
 
The 8600 is more similar to the cm1100.

I doubt there is much difference. You generally can't configure anything the ISP does everything. Most you can see things like logs and signal levels so I guess look at the manuals and see which you like better. It is not like you are going to be looking at it much.

In the end it doesn't really matter the modem is a very stupid and simple device. There is not a lot that can go wrong and the large ISP generally get patches very fast if there was a issue. Docsis has been very well defined and in use for many years now. There is some new docsis 4 or something but many ISP are barely starting to use the ability of 3.1
 
Aug 7, 2022
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MB 8600 has a gigabit port and the MB8611 has a 2.5gbe port. I would get the MB8611 for future proofing.

I have the MB8600 and it's reliable and solid. No weird outages or ping spikes for years I've been using it.

Thanks for the info. I'm leaning towards the MB8611. That being said there is a new nethear cb1000 for $117 or a new Arris SB2000 for $160 on Amazon. Is it worth buying these kinds of renewed modems or should i buy new?
 
Aug 7, 2022
11
0
10
MB 8600 has a gigabit port and the MB8611 has a 2.5gbe port. I would get the MB8611 for future proofing.

I have the MB8600 and it's reliable and solid. No weird outages or ping spikes for years I've been using it.

Thanks for the info. I'm leaning towards the MB8611. That being said there is a new nethear cb1000 for $117 or a new Arris SB2000 for $160 on Amazon. Is it worth buying these kinds of renewed modems or should i buy new? There appear to be a si
 
Aug 7, 2022
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Good morning. Ended up with the Motorola MB8611 modem and TP Link AXE5400 Archer AXE75 router. Fairly easy to set up the modem, but the Archer AXE75 took a couple of tries. I think the TP Link setup problems was mostly user error and involved rebooting the modem and router in the right order. Got 770Mbps in den area this morning, and getting about 120 Mbps in one of the back bedrooms. The furthest bedroom still gets negligible reception; which I was expecting.

Thank you all for your replies. Have a great week!
 
Good to see some number real people get.

Are those wifi6e or wifi6. They should more or less be the same if you can get 160mhz bands and have no interference from neighbors but that is very rare. I was in a way hoping for a bit more if those are wifi6e, then again my gigabit internet will sometime test at 700mbps on a ethernet cable.
 
Aug 7, 2022
11
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Good to see some number real people get.

Are those wifi6e or wifi6. They should more or less be the same if you can get 160mhz bands and have no interference from neighbors but that is very rare. I was in a way hoping for a bit more if those are wifi6e, then again my gigabit internet will sometime test at 700mbps on a ethernet cable.
Wifi6, 5G band. Just got 700 Mbps on my cell phone, but am only 20 feet away from router.

Better news is that I was able to bridge my old Archer C7 to my Archer AXE75 for a 5G channel. So, now - I'm getting 100 Mbps in the furthest bedroom vs. 0 signal.


Again, thanks for everyone's help. !!! :)