A few weeks ago, I grew extremely frustrated with my cable modem connection dropping out on occasion, and revisited the cable splitting approach to some success. However, something didn’t seem right about the speed test I was getting. I’ve been perfectly happy getting download speeds on the order of 5-7 Mb, and upload speeds on the order of 1 Mb.

With all of the hulabaloo on faster home Internet connections lead by the marketing giants at Comcast and Verizon, it left me wondering…

Could I squeeze out more from my home Internet connection?

A look on the back of my aging Toshiba cable modem gave me hope:

That’s a 10Base-T Ethernet interface from the cable modem to the home gateway (currently an Apple AirPort Extreme). Everything else in the home is Gigabit wiring, except for this one link between the home gateway and the cable modem. Could it be that this 10Base-T interface was now my bottleneck in Internet connection speed?

I upgraded to a Motorola SB6120 (with a Gigabit Ethernet interface to my home gateway), and put the unit to the usual speed test.

And check out the result:

That’s an improvement from 8Mb down to 29Mb down, and from 2Mb up to 8 Mb up. WOW! I was honestly shocked that the home network has now outgrown 10Base-T.

Financially, this was actually fortuitous timing; I had recently noticed on my cable modem bill that we were leasing our cable at a cost of $3 per month, and this was increasing to $5 per month in November 2009. Rather than start paying $60 per year to lease the modem, I simply shelled out $85 to buy the new Motorola SB6120 cable modem outright.

Tags: cable modem speed, home network

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 at 3:45 pm and is filed under In The Field. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.