I recently upgraded my cable modem from a Motorola MB8600 to a Hitron CODA56. Reason being Xfinity was emailing me letting me know I could upgrade to DOCSIS 3.1 and get faster upload speeds.
The Hitron CODA56 is the cheapest model on Xfinity’s list of DOCSIS 3.1 supported modems. I paid $140 on Amazon.
Setting it up took 10-15 minutes most of which was waiting for it to reboot.
Here are the before and after speed test results from my office which is about 25 feet from the wifi router.
Before 145 down, 17.5 up.
AFTER – 173 down, 129 up!
So a measured gain of 7.3x on upload speed. Download speed is faster as well but I’m not going to worry about that too much.
This makes pushing my cloud backups so much faster.
If I upload 10GB worth of backups per month, here is the time savings breakdown:
- 129 Mbps / 8 = 16.125 MB/s
- 10GB = 10,000 MB
- 10,000 MB / 16.125 MB/s = 615 seconds to upload that much data (about 10 minutes)
- At the 7.3x slower speed it would be 73 minutes to push the same files
- So the CODA56 will save about an hour a month. Sure I can do other things while the backup is running, but sometimes the backup stalls if my laptop goes to sleep which is a pain.
This upgrade was well worth it!