Advantages: very small, compact fully featured, offers USB networking Disadvantages: expensive to buy - better rented.
Having been using UPC Telekabel’s Chello service for the last eleven months and become dependent on it – I work from home, so having an always on connection is a necessity rather than a luxury, I have become very used to Cable Modem access. Imagine my horror when my chunky LAN City modem appeared to have been toasted, and I had to spend a week on a 56kps dial-up connection. However my patience was rewarded when I got given a Motorola SurfBoard 4100E modem to replace the LAN City brick.
As far as cable modems go, this is one of the most unobtrusive. My LAN City Modem had been 6 inches wide a foot long and 2 inches high, with a strange shape due to the requirement of cooling fins on it. And it sure used to get hot. Imagine my surprise to see the diminutive Surfboard 4100E. Gone was the power supply transformer (also brick ...
I have just swapped over from dial-up to broadband and the Cable Modem that has been installed is a Motorola Surfboard SB Cable Modem - my service provider supplied it free.
The Surfboard comes with an installation disk, which guides you through the set up process although this was done by the engineer on arrival ? but basically just uses an install wizard to guide you through the process just clicking, next and Ok where applicable.
The Modem comes with all the relevant cables and an installation disk.
Once the disk in the hard drive you get a range of options to pick from in a range of languages.
The options are:
Install using the assistant
Look at the user guide
Uninstall
Contact Motorola
Exit
The modem provides you with a high-speed connection to the Internet and its services. It is designed to receive and send ...
Advantages: Cheap and functional Disadvantages: Not a great manual
The Surfboard 4100 Cable Modem, made by Motorola, is provided as standard with the Telewest Blueyonder service. If you buy it separately it's about £150. I'm not going to discuss broadband in general here, just the modem itself - if you're interested in broadband I'll be discussing Blueyonder in another op later.
The packaging it came in was a BIG box - you'd have thought it was a valuable easily breakable antique if you saw the amount of polystyrene protecting the thing. The box had a huge picture of a Surf Board (duh.) on it. The picture was plain but attractive. I was worried that the thing would look like a Surf board when I first opened it - that would have been too cutesy, but fortunately it didn't.
It's quite a sleek model, about 2 inches wide at it's widest point, and quite tall and deep. It looks like a stand up ioniser ...
