Overview

Motorola Surfboard SB5101 at a glance has a more beautiful view than the newest generation of SB6120 DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem. Take a look the appearance is sweet, line indentation in addition for the air vents and the display of LED lights indicator neatly so that it looks elegant on your desk. But I was a little bit disappointed why almost all cable modems and also routers packed with mostly black appearance. Aren’t there other color options other than black? Why not use red or other bright colors so that when placed on the table will be merged into one part of the room decor of your work. The newest models of DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems are not so stylist than Motorola 5101, even they look out of style just black vertical box and no indentation sweet body.

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What this product does

Main features:

• Green eco friendly product with all packaging are recycled materials including shipping carton and package contents
• Consume smaller power supply to save the energy
• Includes one USB port for single connection to a computer in addition to one Ethernet 10/100Mbps port
• You can accommodate up to 63 users on the network

DOCSIS 2.0

As the first generation of cable modem with DOCSIS 2.0 standard, Motorola 5101 is not as fast as the new DOCSIS 3.0 cable modems such as Surfboard SB6120 or SB6121. With the ability to downstream and upstream bandwidth is almost the same around 30Mbps is much slower than the DOCSIS 3 generations of cable modem with a bandwidth up to 100Mbps with multiple channel bonding, even up to 300Mbps downstream and 100Mbps upstream. However, it all also depends on your provider, if the infrastructure they are ready for DOCSIS 3 then you should upgrade your current modem with DOCSIS 3 cable modem.

Fast Ethernet

For standard broadband cable plan, this Motorola 5101 is suitable for supporting your home multimedia environment. With 10/100Mbps Ethernet port can be connected to wireless router standard with fast Ethernet WAN port, or probably your wireless router includes gigabit Ethernet ports both LAN and WAN interfaces, no problem.

Performance

But remember if you have already started to apply video and voice applications over multiple devices simultaneously network performance becomes increasingly heavy, even your video streaming and online gaming becomes stagnant not running perfectly, and you even get frustrated with the performance of your wifi network that drop frequently. This is the time for you upgrade your cable broadband plan from standard to blast or whatever higher bandwidth plan is. And, upgrade your Motorola 5101 with SB6121 or Surfboard SB6141 which are based on DOCSIS 3.0 cable modem. And off course pay attention to your current wireless router, is there any effect of the plan and modem upgrade?

Do a test by running a heavy application online gaming and see if there is a significant improvement with this new modem and with existing standard router. If there is an increase, then gradually add other heavy duty applications such as running HD video streaming on the computer or through Apple TV to your HDTV and see if there is a decrease in performance. If more heavy applications are running and your network performance drastically diminishing, it’s time you also have to upgrade the router with a router that is designed specifically for multimedia such as Netgear WNDR4500 or Linksys EA4500 and more.

Customer ratings

You know how the rating of this Motorola 5101 on Amazon? It’s very remarkable with a rating average of 4.4 out of 5 stars. This is great achievement of a product that is accepted by the users. If you only use this modem to support your standard wifi network at home, then this product is definitely worth experimenting with a very affordable price below $ 60.

Connection Diagram

To allow you share the internet, you need to connect the Ethernet port of the cable modem to the WAN (internet) port of a wireless router. When you purchase a wireless router, a UTP network cable is generally supplied that comes with the modem. Use this cable for connecting the cable modem in one end and the router in the other end.

In this diagram, Motorola 5101 cable modem connects to the Buffalo Wzr-Hp-Ag300h wireless high gain router. Couples of mobile devices connect wirelessly to the network and two desktop connect to the router using wired cable. Mostly wireless routers include four Ethernet ports, but Apple airport extreme supports only three Ethernet ports. And even the D Link Dir-632 includes 8 Ethernet ports, ideal for small offices.

By Ki Grinsing