Arris SURFboard SB6183

I finally bought my own cable modem in March 2016. We got the Arris SURFboard SB6183 DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem from Amazon for about $100.

Setup was pretty easy but did require I activate the modem using the Comcast instructions and reboot all of my network devices. Making sure things got rebooted in the right order was the hardest part of the process. I had to ensure that the modem picked up the router as the MAC address of the connected device and then connect my computer to the router to activate the modem. I got it wrong the first time and had my computer connected directly to the modem so when I connected the router things stopped working. Didn’t take long to fix it up, but was a little tedious.

In June 2019 we switched from Comcast back to Frontier (now Ziply) which doesn’t use a cable modem. I’m not marking this as deprecated yet, since we’ll still use it if we go back to Comcast. It’s just not in active rotation.