[mattmarshall]

hey all.....

optimum online finally came to my area. i want to order it today. the thing is, their modems are 140 dollars. i was wondeirng--are there any cheaper cable modems out there that i could purchase to use with optimum online?

basically, i'm looking for the cheapest one i can find, but it has to be pretty good. (are their "good" and "bad" cable modems?!)

any extra info about using a Mac (w/ airport) with optimum online is much appreciated....thanks!


-matt

[Cipher13]

Hmm. Well some are better than others but it doesn't make much difference... I can't help you with where to get one, given my location, but first of all decide whether you want a built in router or not; from there, you could get a hub/switch to attach to the router or something.

[bil207]

If you are in the NY metro area you can see if the WIZ has any promos re. opt. online modems. I got a $100.00 rebate on the modem when I signed up last year.

[seanyepez]

You should just get the service regardless of the modem cost. Dial-up is terrible. Broadband, no matter the price, is worth it.

I have a 3Com cable modem with USB and Ethernet (still shrinkwrapped) if you want to buy it. I am willing to sell it for $125.

[RealMac]

Which modem was $140 out of curiosity? I'm using the black terayon docsic modem (and have since june 2000) and have haven't had any problems with it. There were a few outages (once every couple weeks I could tell), but things were usually working within an hour's time. You don't want to skimp too much on a cable modem.

Keep in mind that this is a piece of hardware that will be on almost 24/7 (in my case) and should be designed to handle this kind of usage.

I went to The Wiz to sign up with Optimum, with a 2 year contract, the modem was $120 if my memory serves me correctly.

Hey, $140 isn't that bad. In 1997 I paid about $170 for a supraexpress 56k modem which doesn't even work now (got fried somehow) and didn't exactly provide much of an improvement over the 28.8 FastMac v.34 modem I had used prior.

I don't know about airport, but it should work work without any major issues. OOL works using DHCP, which airport works fine with for establishing IP addresses.

Once you go cable, you don't want to ever go back to dial-up.