Xfinity sent me an email a while back saying service in our area had been upgraded to 600 Mbps, and that my modem couldn’t handle this extreme new bandwidth. But any network test was showing 550-580 Mbps so… seemingly it could handle most of it. I filed a mental note, went on with my life.

But more recently they sent another email saying speed had been increased even more, and my modem was objectively trash at this point, so maybe consider a new one. This seemed more interesting, so I did some research about which modems are actually ok and not unreliable disasters, and picked up the ARRIS SURFboard S33 which is a name that is both cool and lame at the same time, somehow. I guess we still “surf” the web? Feels like like we’ve got our foot trapped in a rock and the waves just slap us on our head over and over and over.

Anyway, I installed it tonight, and Xfinity was not lying, the old modem was slow and sad and the new one gets us 1 gig down ¹. Also using their app to register the new modem took about 10 minutes and was entirely painless. It was, I dare even say, Comcastic.

This modem is in theory capable of 2.5 Gbps down, although I do not believe Xfinity will be promising that any time soon, and it would require replacing a lot of other hardware, and honestly, I just don’t think I can click on links that fast.

Footnotes

1. The upload speed remains sad and slow, only slightly better than a man in 1880 repeating a Morse code message down a telegraph line. ↩