When that Shark bites!

I’ll give you an offer you can’t refuse…
About a year ago, AT&T broadband cable Internet access became available in my area. Since DSL has not as yet arrived, I was dying to soup-up my connection speeds! Rather than pay the extra monthly fee for renting AT&T’s cable modem I searched around for one to call my own. I found just about everyone and their brother was making cable modems, however not all of them are created equal. Certain cable companies belong to certain cable modem mafia families and require certain “certifications” for use on their networks. AT&T requires their modem’s to be DOCIS certified. This is supposedly to guarantee a certain level of data transmission quality and blah, blah, blah…..I don’t really know for sure (smells like B.S. to me much like those vague UL ratings)!

Farewell and addew fair maidens of Spain!
This unit by 3Com came highly recommended and had all the “certifications” that I needed. I received it no problem looks like a sharks dorsal fin. Kind of ugly and awkward to stack or place in inconspicuous places. I plugged it in, connected it to my computer and I was surfing at speeds that required a seat belt on my computer chair! My only problem was that I had to wait a month for my cable company to “install” it into their databases. Soon afterwards came the big Excite@home debacle (in which one of the afore mentioned cable modem mafia families made a successful “hit”, thus taking out a division of Excite.com, but I digress).

Where did my support go?
I would otherwise highly recommend this unit, however last straw was broken when 3Com up and decided that they would no longer support the Home broadband arena. Thus any hopes I had for upgrades and/or hardware/software patches just went up in smoke! So far, I have not had any problems with this unit where I would need customer support, but I would like to think that it would be there in case I need it.