[SOLVED] Should I buy a fancy cable modem?

[loevenro]

Hello,

I recently upgraded my ancient motorola surfboard to a new modem I got from Charter Spectrum recently. They gave me a Hitron which drops offline randomly and gives random latency. Seems it uses the puma 6 chip. They won't offer me anything besides this exact Hitron model, so I've decided to buy my own.

I'm looking at getting a Netgear CM500, which should be more than sufficient for my 100 Mbps spectrum plan and is on their approved modem list.

I already have a nice router, a NightHawk X6 AC3200.

I have a decent number of devices attached to my network, probably ~15 at any given time. Though the most important thing to me is low ping and stability while gaming.

So my question is this: Do I have anything to gain from buying a more advanced modem than the CM500? Other than the ability to upgrade my max speed beyond the limit of the CM500 in the future?

Thanks!

 

[COLGeek]

Sure, go for the Netgear CM500 . Hopefully, it will perform better than what they provided and not cost you a monthly rental fee (assuming you pay one). What you MAY gain is increased stability. If not, then there is a line problem that Spectrum will need to address.

 

[SamirD]

Spectrum usually doesn't have a monthly modem fee so you're wasting time and money as isp equipment will always perform better than byom (bring your own modem) as it's in their best interest for it to work well.

And you won't see any performance difference since the isp loads their config file in the modem, and they're not going to tweak these for each modem. So in the end you're paying for the same thing you could get for fre.

I would let the isp fix their stuff. And the puma myth is a myth--I use 2x sb6190s to form a latency sensitive link across the country and they've been perfect since I put them in place a few years ago.

 

[loevenro]

Thanks very much for the advice!