The Surfboard 4100 Cable Modem, made by Motorola, is provided as standard with the Telewest Blueyonder service. If you buy it separately it's about £150. I'm not going to discuss broadband in general here, just the modem itself.
The packaging it came in was a BIG box - you'd have thought it was a valuable easily breakable antique if you saw the amount of polystyrene protecting the thing. The box had a huge picture of a Surf Board (duh.) on it. The picture was plain but attractive. I was worried that the thing would look like a Surf board when I first opened it - that would have been too cutesy, but fortunately it didn't.
It's quite a sleek model, about 2 inches wide at it's widest point, and quite tall and deep. It looks like a stand up ioniser rather than a piece of computer equipment. It does only come in computer beige as far as I know, but for a modem it's quite curvy and sexy.
It has four connections on the back - one for the cable itself to plug into, one for the power, one which the LAN cable plugs into for the network card in the PC, which you have to buy separately, or get provided by Blueyonder in my case, and another USB connection for adding another PC.
I've stayed away from the USB simply because I used to work in tech support and found lots of users were ringing up with trouble with their USB cable modems. USB and networks doesn't always seem to go together :-) . I'm not sure how true that is in this case, but to be on the safe side I avoided it.
I 'm a two PC household, so I've set up my computer as a gateway machine, and am using internet connection sharing to serve Marks.
The modem has four lights on the front, the very top one is for power, the middle three indicate receiving, sending and online. The bottom one flashes on and off to indicate activity.
The lights are clearly labelled thankfully, and are good indicators for diagnosing problems.
There's only one button on the front of the unit, marked standby. I tend to leave it always on, just using this button to reset the unit.
When you reset it, the power light will flash off then on again, then the receive and send lights will flash briefly while the modem re-connects - something akin to handshaking back in the old 56k days I guess :-)
Once the modem has authenticated itself the third light will come on also, then the activity light will flash briefly and away you go - free to surf again.
If the lights don't come on in that order, then the chances are there?s something wrong - DO the usual troubleshooting stuff - restart your PC, check the connection in the back of the PC and the modem just in case, reset the modem again, unplug it for a couple of minutes and try again - then think about calling tech support.
You get some software with this modem - but its just stuff like Internet Explorer, Netscape and some other communication stuff, not worth cluttering up the hard drive with really.
I've not had any problems with this - it sits on the bookcase, serving me data 24/7 without me even noticing it's there. I only unplugged it yesterday to allow it to reset when I upgraded the speed of my cable connection, and it worked straight away when I plugged it back in.
The manual provides basic installation and trouble shooting instructions and is easy to understand. It doesn't provide hugely detailed specifications or go into much depth, but I won' t pick too much about that.
It's compact, relatively good looking, reliable and user friendly. It's also not the most expensive of cable modems. What more can you want?
If you're going for Blueyonder, then you're getting a good deal with this modem, if you're with another service and have the option of renting or buying, then buy this if you can afford it, it's well worth it.
