Pretty sure I'm going to sign up for 400 MB tier. I have been doing a little research and am wondering what folks here think about renting the modem/router from Spectrum of purchasing your own. Looks like you need a special router for anything over 300 MB from what I have been reading. Tom's Hardware recommends a Netgear CM 600 I think was the model number. Would love to hear recommendations from actual users.
Charter does not charge a lease fee for their modems. You can buy your own if you are so inclined as long as it’s on their approved list, but there is no advantage of doing so.
If you take theirs, you will mostly likely get a Spectrum branded modem. These are DOCSIS 3.1 modems that support voice service that can bond up to 32 QAMs and 2 OFDMAs downstream and 8 QAMs and 2 OFDMAs upstream. In most areas Charter is 32 + 1 down and 4 up.
There are two versions that are made by three different OEMs. These are eMTA modems only, they are not all in one gateways/routers. All models look physically identical.
Original modem is model# E31_2V1
New modem is model# E_2251
Where the _ is you will have the letters N, T or U. Those represent the manufacture.
N - Hitron / T – Technicolor / U – Ubee
The E31_2V1s have a 1.0 Gb ethernet port, the E_2251s have a 2.5 Gb ethernet port, that’s the main difference between the two generations.
The Hitron’s seem to have some weird issues that pop up, and they use the Intel Puma 7 chipset, which there’s some stigma around because of the issues surrounding the Puma 6. The Ubee and Technicolor use Broadcom chipsets.
Spectrum branded wireless routers are available. They are free for Gig subscribers and a $5 rental charge for Standard and Ultra subscribers. Again, they branded Spectrum, all look identical but are manufactured by Arris/Commscope, Askey and Sagemcom. They are Wireless AC wave 2 with the standard integrated four port ethernet switch.
You do not need a special router for 400 Mbps Ultra service, you just need one that is halfway decent and can support faster WLAN speeds if you are primarily going to be on wifi. I have a Wireless AC access point and an AX card in my laptop and on 5 GHz while not to far away from the AP WAN speeds max out at 560 Mbps. 2.4 GHz will not get you anywhere close to 400 Mbps. For hardwired connections you want to make sure all routers/switches/NICs are gigabit not 10/100. If you have a hardwired device, do a speed test and it comes back in the 90s, that means you have 10/100 hardware in the mix somewhere.
Like most ISPs, Charter overprovisions connections by 20%. On Ultra you should max out at around or just under 480 Mb Down/22 Mb Up.
For recommendations, I cannot make any specific ones because I am not your average bear. But I would use a Charter provided D3.1 modem and get your own router. I would NOT use a Netgear CM600. It's only D3 and only 24 channels. More channels being bonded means less chance of you experiencing slow downs during times of high node utilization.
I’ve been Gig subscriber since day 1 and used both the E31U2V1 (original Ubee) and E31T2V1 (original Technicolor) modems in the past and have no bad experiences with either. Currently using a ET2251 (new Technicolor) in order to max out my gig connection at around 1170 Mbps. I am primary hardwired, I hate wifi. I use a Cisco SMB WIRED router in conjunction with a Cisco SMB wireless access point. The router is my bottle neck as my desktop PC has a 10 Gb NIC, but the router only has 1 Gb ports so the only time I see speeds in excess of a gigabit is when I hook the modem directly to my PC. I'm awaiting a somewhat affordable 10 Gb router that can meet my needs of hosting my own VPN, dual WAN failover, gateway to gateway tunnel support and VLAN support.
. She does not want to leave DISH and neither do I really. The salesman told me that TV is just a Roku that the installer will bring and we can install it on one TV and they have a Cloud DVR, which is $5 a month, which I sprung for just so we can play with it. He said we could add our own Roku to any other TV in the house with no extra charge. We don't have any Rokus and probably won't buy one so I don't think that will happen. Now I know that the town was built out over the last 3 years with fiber by a contractor working for Spectrum so the system backbone is 100% fiber. The salesman said that it is "Fiber To The Home" so we will see if that is true when they install next Tuesday. My boys are looking forward to finally having fast internet.
