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Transitioning to Comcast Now!

I've transitioned to Comcast NOW, a lower speed, lower cost alternative.  The kids have grown up and moved out.  I'm spending much more of my time traveling.  I don't need the high speeds at home like I used to.

This transition promises to save me $240 dollars a year versus my old "discounted" plan.

Xfinity to Comcast Now transitioning process

  1. I went to the Xfinity store and told them I was cancelling two weeks out.  This isn't weird - people move all the time, so they do have a process for cancelling at a future ("move-out") date.
  2. Later the same day, I was able to go to the Comcast website and order the NOW modem for the new service. Note that Comcast didn't let me do this until I had a future cancel order in place.
  3.  Three days later, the modem arrived via FedEx.
  4. The cancel date came and went - Xfinity seems to have a grace period, so the old modem wasn't unceremoniously yanked out of service at midnight.  This made the transition smooth.
  5.  Then I powered up the new modem, plugged in my router, and 10 minutes later with no action on my part, it just worked.  It was easier than I expected!

Regarding the Modem

  • My Comcast NOW modem is the Arris/Comcast "XB3".  It is a combo device (modem + wifi router).  
  • The modem can be reached and configured at http://10.0.0.1/ 
  • I have an existing LAN router, so I put the XB3 modem in bridge mode.  Bridge mode disables routing at the modem so that my existing home router can do that job. Bridge mode also disables the device's WiFi, all but one switch port, DHCP, etc.  If you think about what a home router does, this makes perfect sense.
  • The XB3 modem is a bit power-hungry.  Even in Bridge mode, it is eating about 14 watts 24x365.  That's about double the power consumption of my good old SB6190, and will cost me about $20 more to power every year. 
  • I wall mounted the XB3 on my network backboard.  It isn't designed for wall mounting, but with a little zip tie ingenuity it is easy. More on this soon.

Performance

I got the cheapo plan, which purports to be "100/20".  My Speed Test reports about 117 Mb/s  download and 23 Mb/s upload, with an unloaded latency of 19.5 ms.   In practical terms, my download is now 1/5th the performance it was, and my upload speed has been cut in half.  Big deal?   Is such a rollback in service speed worth a ~ $220 per year savings? Time will tell! 

 

 

 

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