Good basic product

Disclaimer: I work for a cable company, so I have access to back-end information not normally available to most end users.

I picked up the Linksys BEFCMU10 cable modem "surplus" from my employer, mostly because I have other Linksys gear (a WRT54G and a 16-port workgroup switch) that stacks neatly with this guy. It is rev. 4 hardware, and rev. 2 firmware. I use Ethernet exclusively (although, read below for USB observations).

Our standard cable package is a DOCSIS-1.0 package, with 8M down and 384k up. I live at the edge of a node, so my signal quality is marginal.

The Linksys cable modem has worked flawlessly. Even considering I live near the fringe, it is able to sync up perfectly, and I get speeds close to what I'm supposed to get.

My particular cable company also has a new DOCSIS-2.0 plant, with speeds of 8M down and 1M up. On a lark, I also tested the device on the new plant, and had no problems. I also opened up the modem completely, no bandwidth caps, and was able to get nearly 20MB/s down in testing.

I read other people's reviews here regarding speed problems, especially compared to Motorola devices and thought I'd check it out. Compared to a Motorola SurfBoard SB5120, I was unable to detect any differences using speed test tools from BroadbandReports. Curious, I decided to dig deeper.

After some testing, I suspect (and the previous reviewers did not indicate) that they may have been using USB. The Linksys uses the slower USB 1.1 interface, which can dramatically affect performance. I observed that the Linksys device was slower than other devices, most of which now support USB 2.0.

In the month and a half of service here, it has performed flawlessly. In discussions with co-workers, and in examining our back-end performance metrics, Linksys modems appear to be good strong devices, especially compared to "cheapo" cable modems.