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United States of America, Lafayette
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712 Review
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Review on Renewed NETGEAR Nighthawk Cable Modem CM1200 - Compatible with All Cable Providers, Up to 2 Gigabit Cable Plans, 4 x 1G Ethernet Ports, DOCSIS 3.1, Black by Bill Lyons

Revainrating 3 out of 5

great spec, with almost useless LACP implementation and no support for Xfinity Home

So Revain wants me to star them for "transparency" and "thickness" rate. What does that mean? Doesn't matter? Is it relevant to more than 0.0001% of buyers? I tried this modem and returned this modem. I had this great plan to use LACP (Link Aggregation Control Protocol) for the core devices in my house so that when the home network finally connects to the Xfinity network I have the best chance of using all my bandwidth. Pay for. I overheard some people going over 1000Mbps with Xfinity because they don't bother to get it over 1000Mbps. I have an Xfinity Voice so it's the only modem so far that can transmit this. Unfortunately, this device did not live up to expectations. The problem is described in the Netgear forums; LACP degrades within hours or a day, and the best solution anyone has come up with is to put this device on a Christmas light timer so that it restarts at 4am every day. In my case, I noticed extreme deterioration within three hours. When I disabled LACP the degradation went away and I had normal speed fluctuations throughout the day. So then I figured I could just keep this modem and stop paying Xfinity rent and maybe Netgear will fix the firmware at some point. But at this point the problem had been reported a year earlier and no resolution had been made. Why would a company advertise a feature but then not deploy the feature or fix it a year after reporting the issue? It's very possible that the problem is deep somewhere and they can't fix it with a firmware patch, for example maybe a chipset they put in just has a bug and it's cheaper for them, a small percentage of the Risking returns from LACP knockoffs instead of redesigning and having a new board made. (Though thinking a bit what a crazy incentive Netgear might have, I'm wondering if they have a deal with Xfinity). Still, assuming Netgear can never fix the problem, it might make sense to keep this modem. and just use it without LACP to save on modem rental. Well, there's a good chance someone will come out with a modem that will solve the LACP problem in the time it takes to pay for itself because it's a pretty expensive modem. But there was one more thing I didn't understand when I thought about replacing my Xfinity modem. I have Xfinity Home. I can't remember why, but I think Xfinity had some sort of bundle that actually saved me money to include Xfinity Home. As soon as I activated the CM1150V, I immediately received an email from Xfinity that I had canceled Xfinity Home. Hm? I didn't cancel it. It turns out Xfinity Home requires you to rent a Xfinity modem and I don't know what magic they use, but without your Wi-Fi generating Xfinity modem the Xfinity Home controller is lost. (I mean it still has a cellular modem backup, but I guess Xfinity wouldn't want you to rely on that except for failover because they pay someone to use their cellular connection). And to make the experience even more frustrating, after I switched back to the old Xfinity modem from the CM1150V, REACTIVATING Xfinity Home required a customer service intervention that was a combination of a chat and a phone call; You cannot carry out a REACTIVATION yourself. So if this device delivered LACP, I'd probably throw out Xfinity Home because I hardly ever use it anyway. That's why I got it. And the unreliable delivery was the reason I sent it back.

Pros
  • good thing
Cons
  • I don't remember but there was something