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Sunday, 12 Oct 2014

New Time Warner Router Arris DG1670a (UPDATED)

As part of TWC's upgraded super fast Internet speeds in NYC (300M/20M at the highest tier, marketed as MAXX speeds), I needed a 16x4 channel DOCSIS 3.0 modem. Since the Arris SB6183 doesn't seem to be available via retail (correction, it is available now, see link at the bottom), I continued to lease from TWC and requested a router swap. They were speedy, sent me a new one that showed up at my doorstep in 2 days. I thought of this as a temporary move, TWC charges around $6/mo for the router lease, buying a SB6183 would pay by itself in a few months.

I set it up in bridged mode, since I do not want to transfer all the port forwarding settings from my Linksys/Cisco E4200. It comes with 2 networks, a 2.4 GHz and a 5 Ghz, both n-capable (I was hoping for ac, but no luck). They both seem to come online and appear to work fine. I turned them off in the meantime, since I am still using the aforementioned E4200.

The DG1670a delivered my older service speed (100M/5M) without a problem. The new 300/20M service came online a few weeks after I received the router.

I had read people mentioning "port 80 and 443" being blocked in bridge mode DG1670A setups. I did not find this to be the case. Inbound or outbound. IPv4 or IPv6. It all just worked.

Oddly, I found that the router part of the DG1670A seems to still have a public IPv4 address, even in bridge mode. Seems like a waste.


UPDATE: [1/10/2015] Now 3 months later, I am very happy with the DG1670a. The router is very stable, I basically have never had to reboot it this entire time. The speed bump from TimeWarner happened automatically in November. I suddenly jumped to their fastest performance. In my tests I am getting about 322 Mbps down & 20 Mbps up. I almost couldn't believe it at first, but yes, it is definitely there, and it is super fast. Now, keep in mind parts of your network may become the bottleneck now, given that 300 Mbps is very fast. In my case, the old E4200 has become the bottleneck. Theoretically the backplane of my cisco/linksys should be able to push ~450 Mbps, but that is theoretical, and in real-life it maxes out at about 240-260 Mbps. That is still incredibly fast for my wireless clients and most nothing out there can keep up with those speeds, so it in practical terms it is fine. I do get the full 300 Mbps+ from my gigabit-wired clients, for example from my server, and that makes a difference when downloading very large files.

The upstream bandwidth bump of 4x (from 5Mbps to 20Mbps) is most noticeable on simple things I didn't anticipate. For example, sync'ing my dropbox files, or posting images to FB from iPhoto, it's pretty awesome. I feel TW should give us even a bit more upstream bandwidth, maybe 50 Mbps, but I do understand their concern regarding hosting at home.

I still have the DG1670a configured in bridge mode as explained above and no issues, no port blocking of any kind. The E4200 does all my port forwarding and so on. Below is a link to the SB6183 if you decide to buy it (will take just shy of 2 years to pay for itself at current TW lease rates vs. price of the router). I also threw in links to 2 high quality AC routers: the Netgear R7000 and the Asus AC68U, both of I which I recommend without hesitation.

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