SB5120 Surfboard Cable Modem Docsis 1.1 and 2.0 Certified USB

Thursday, March 18th, 2010 at 15:26

Manufacturer: Motorola
Customer Rating:
List Price: $69.99
Sale Price: $179.99
Availibility: View Product Availability

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Product Description

MOTOROLA SB5120 505788-006-00 SURFboard(R) Cable Modem Can download up to 100x faster than traditional analog modems ; Enhanced with TurboDOX(TM) bandwidth optimization software ; CableLabs(R) DOCSIS(TM) 1.1 & 2.0 Certified(TM) ; Simple installation using either an Ethernet or USB connection ; Includes power adapter SURFboard(R) Cable Modem

Product Details

SURFboard SB5120 cable modem, USB and Ethernet cables, Power adapter / Instaallation CD-ROM with USB drivers and access to special online bonus offers
Windows PC and Macintosh compatible
Works with most cable pipeline Internet connections - subscription service required from your local carrier
Always on, always connected
Installs easily in just four steps

Video Reviews

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Customer Reviews

Outstanding modem!

Review Date: December 16, 2005

Reviewer: Gene Pope, Trout Creek, MT USA

My old RCA modem for my [...] service turned flakey so I called Comcast to come out and see what was wrong. They replaced the modem with some no-name cheapie and I saw my download rate drop from 4 MBps to 1.2 MBps ! Yikes! I called their techs again and asked what happened. Their response: "The ping looks great, you can't trust those speed test websites (dslreports in this case) and modems don't make any difference in speed". Yeah, right. I immediately bought this Surfboard modem, replaced the no-name one, called Comcast to enable the MAC address and what was 1.2 MPs download immediately prior to the modem switch-out was now happily above 4 MBps and a totally solid connection! The cable modem makes a huge difference and this is a great one!

Fast, Reliable, Better Than Linksys

Review Date: August 9, 2005

Reviewer: Embedded Engineer, Cary, NC USA

Used the SB5120 to replace Linksys BEFCMU10 (Version 3.0). The SB5120 performs better and is much more stable.

I had performance and reliability problems using VOIP service over my Linksys cable modem. Under load the Linksys cable modem has high latency and performs poorly. The Linksys cable modem required a reset a few times a week. (Note: no problems with my Linksys VOIP router.)

With the SB5120 my VOIP connection sounds better and is more stable (no cable modem resets required). My overall latency is lower and WEB pages load much faster.

Packet forwarding performance is much better with the SB5120.

What a difference

Review Date: March 23, 2006

Reviewer: Dave,

I echo the sentiments of several of the reviewers about slow degradation of modems over time resulting in flaky function with intermittent loss of service, and subpar download speeds. I also share the experience with tech support at Comcast that was clueless about this possibility, never suggesting it, doing a lot of meaningless tests with reassurances, making me go through a lot of purposeless handstands as they tried to troubleshoot the difficulty.

Exasperated, to experiment on my own, I replaced my 5 year old RCA modem with this Motorola, basically to save the tech fee for a housecall if it was simply the modem, and it most certainly was that. So the savings in the tech fee paid for the modem!! (...) Although my download speed never exceeded 3.5 Mb/s with the old modem, I was supposed to be getting 5+ Mb/s. With this Motorola modem I am getting about 9.2 Mb/s!! The surfing efficiency is very noticeably improved, and I should have tried this months ago.

The installation is trivial, and once the ISP configures the modem, you're up and running. If you are using a router in a network, you may have to reconfigure your router with the new setup. My Linksys router would not function even though I reset it, until I went through the steps to completely reconfigure it which only took a couple of minutes.

This modem also has a handy standby switch which effectively breaks the connection of the modem to the network computers as an added security feature when you are not using the internet. It does have a very narrow profile with a shallow footed base, so with cords attached, it is a little metastable on a desktop. It is best to place it against a more solid structure on the desk, or if you have it in the kneewell of a desk, as I do, it fits beautifully and securely against the sidewall on top of my multimedia subwoofer.

Highly recommended product.

The Only Modem to Own

Review Date: April 10, 2007

Reviewer: H. S. Marsh,

The SURFboard SB5120 is the only modem that I would want to own. My download speeds are over 20 Mbps, even though the cable provider claims to deliver only 6 Mbps. The features include a standby mode to isolate my LAN from the Internet when we don't need connectivity, and browser access to the modem provides information on everything that you would want to know about the current status, signal levels, configuration, and recent history. My order through Amazon was delivered by the vendor much faster than they had promised, and it's been up and running continuously since the day that I booted it up and got it registered with the ISP.

Wow- 3.5x faster than older Docsis 1.1 modem

Review Date: December 9, 2005

Reviewer: K. Maletsky,

I'm having some router problems which I thought might be related to the cable modem, so I bought this to replace a Toshiba PCX2200 Docsis 1.1 modem on my Adelphia service (which they say is all upgraded to Docsis 2.0)

Both modems work so I can switch back and forth and compare pretty close to real time. So I ran 3 different online bandwidth tests from different sites to see if it's worth the money for the upgrade.

The average download performance upgrade was 3.5x better (up to 5.9Mbit/sec) and the average upload gain was 7x better.

I've got nothing against the Toshiba - it's worked perfectly for a few years and all the online and help desk reviews of it are good. Even though Toshiba is working fine, it's worth the extra money to get a 3x improvement (especially considering the high price I pay to Adelphia every month).

I'm using it on a Mac, I never installed the software, works fine out of the box.

Highly recommended.

(It has a standby switch which disconnects the computers but keeps the cable side live. That would be nice in a small setup but my modem is inconveniently located and I have mutiple computers).

Tagged with: Cable • certified • docsis • modem • sb5120 • Surfboard