Review on ARRIS Surfboard S33 Multi Gigabit Ethernet by Drew Gengler

EDIT 3: Upgrade to Xfinity Gigabit level. Always 935 down and 40 up. That's because I don't have 2.5 Gbps. If you configured a 2.5 Gbps network, you should get 1.2 Gbps (20% more than Xfinity). I haven't had any problems with the modem since I received the product. EDIT 2: Has been running for over a week now without a single crash. So in terms of stability, I don't expect a reboot will ever be needed. But of course time will tell. EDIT 1: Upgrade to 5 stars. Another infuriates the lack of an Ethernet cable on such an expensive modern device. But it's been stable for 2 days and I've run a fair amount of ping tests on two of my favorites (this one and the Motorola MB8611, both with 2.5Gbps ethernet for future testing) and after thousands of pings I've got it I plotted this and found the median and third quartile are faster by almost a millisecond. No huge differential. But even the single muted blue light won me over in terms of looks, along with its ultra-small form factor. All in all I decided to return all the other 3 and be happy with that in order to upgrade the modem. Initial Rating 4 stars (only 1 star deducted because I was annoyed that I couldn't find a network cable for such an expensive modem): I've been experimenting with various DOCIS 3.1 modems over the past few months or so. I have bought Arris 8200, Motorola MB 8600 (Motorola really is into Zoom telephony) and 8611. Here is the first impression:1. No network cable in the box: I was very disappointed. The Arris 8200 came with a good flat network cable. The Motorola 8600 and 8611 had an old style round network cable. But not this one! 2. It looks so much better than the Arris 8200. The 8200 is so terrible that I decided to return it for looks alone. Motorola probably still wins on looks (this is your personal choice). But given the size of Motorola modems, I would have preferred this cute little modem. BTW the modem is really tiny (about the same size as the 8200 but actually a bit shorter and thinner).3. Unlike the 8200, 8600 and 8611, the S33 actually forced me to call Xfinity to activate it (other modems activated via the xfinity app with no problems). Some observations on firmware compared to Motorola MB 8611 and Arris 8200:1. Unlike the Arris 8200, the S33 doesn't have a spectrum analyzer! At least I can't access 192.168.100.1:80802. For me the SNR/MER on the S33 is more or less the same as the MB 8611 on all channels, except the OFDM PLC shows 1dB less than the 8611 (maybe it will get better as the modem locks in better). .3. Power shifted by a whopping -5 dBmV. While most of my channels on the MB 8611 were 8dBmV (except OFDM PLC which was -2dBmV), S33 shows about 3dBmV for all except OFDM PLC and on OFDM PLC it shows -5dBmV. So the overall signal level has shifted by -5 (and OFDM has shifted by -3).4. The upstream power level appears to be more or less the same for both the S33 and the 8611. I just installed the modem. So I'll have to test for a few days and see solid and non solid before reporting them. On 8611 I was accumulating minor single digit fixes and unfixable ones were very rare (less than 1 per day).