Motorola SURFboard SB5101 Cable Modem (515290-087-00)

We purchased the Motorola SURFboard Cable Modem at Best Buy a while back, and have been very happy with the results we have received from the product. When we first moved to a wireless network in our old house, we used a Motorola modem and have stuck with the brand name after the success we have found with their products. The SB5101 Motorola Cable Modem was recommended to us at Best Buy, and ended up being what we went with. Looking back on the purchase, we are still happy that we bought the Motorola SURFboard, and still content with the great performance that it has given us.

Probably the most important spec. from this Motorola Modem is that it works well right out of the box, and that if you are working towards setting up your own private wireless network, it will perform nicely as soon as it is plugged in. The selling point for the Motorola SURFboard was that it would provide quick page viewing capabilities on the internet and give us "blazing speed" when it came to downloading videos. It was also supposed to help with online game playing, and for all of the above advertisements, I think that the Motorola SURFboard has performed brilliantly. It's hard not to sound like a salesman when writing about the positive aspects of this cable modem, but it has really worked that well for us.

I noted earlier that it worked well right out of the box, and following the instructions provided with the modem made it very easy to set up. If you are taking the step of creating your own wireless network at home, you will need a nice cable modem to hook everything up to. With this modem, it connects straight to the internet feed from our cable company by screwing in the cable cord, and then sends that signal through an additional cable to your wireless device. Working together, your cable modem and wireless device provide your house with a great network, and having a device like the Motorola SURFboard on one end of the chain will ensure that you are getting good quality for your money.

Some of the specifics about this device are that it has both USB and Ethernet connectivity to make sure that it will work with any PC or Mac that you hook up to the device. It claims that you can get up to 63 users at the same time on a network using this modem, but I can only lay claim to having three different computers running simultaneously with no problems. It does live up to the promise of providing quick loading speed, and it has always given a great upstream and downstream of data through the computers. We use Windows based computers with this modem, but it is also supposed to work with Macintosh and UNIX systems with no problems. It also comes with the USB and Ethernet cables, as well as a power adapter and installation CD Rom to get you started with anything extra on that first time out of the box.

The front of the Motorola SURFboard Cable Modem provides a number of lights that allow you to view how your network and its computers are working with the internet at any given moment. It will also tell you if you actually have hooked up everything correctly, and whether you are on the internet or need to adjust something to try again. The lights on the front correspond to modes, and read as follows; power, receive, send, online, pc/activity, and standby. They are all relatively self explanatory and read out the ability of your modem at any given moment. If you are online, that button will light up green, and if you are able to send or receive, those will be lit up as well. If they go dark, or remain dark, then something is wrong with either the hook-up or the connection at that moment.

We were able to purchase the Motorola SURFboard Cable Modem (SB5101) while it was on sale for right around $50.00, but I believe that the price has gone up slightly since that buying decision. I still think it is worth it to have a cable modem such as this one which can be counted on. If you ever run across a problem with the internet or with one of your connections, it s easy to reset the modem using the small button on the top exterior. We have been much happier having a modem like this in the house, and it has always led to us having fast upload and download times no matter how large the files are that we are working with. I would highly recommend this Motorola SURFboard Cable Modem, and suggest that anyone who is building a home wireless network take a keen look at it. It is affordable, dependable, and it doesn t need to be maintained like some others on the market. It just sits back quietly and does its job after that initial set-up.