Top 10 best Router Modems 2022 Price and Feature Comparison

My story is a little different in that I may end up returning the product but I will give it a good rating. Let me explain in hopes that this review will help out other reviewers who have encountered similar problems.– Before I Purchased the EquipmentI read nearly every review that I could. I was well aware of some of the issues. But what won me over was how the NetGear customer service team really owned the issues and asked the customers to respond to them. This was far better than the experience I’ve had with Time Warner/Spectrum cable.–Before Buying My Cable ModemMy issue was that my internet was undependable. I’d see speeds go from 100 to 20 with my default cable modem rental. A friend suggested that I try another modem as that is often a cause of it. Keeping in mind that I am paying for an Ultimate 300 MB/s package and I can never get over 100, you see the frustration — especially when your job involves heavy downloading. So, after multiple calls to the cable service provider, I purchased the modem.–The Initial Speed Results…After spending all day with the cable company getting it connected, I was surprised to find it running even slower than before. Furthermore, I could no longer stream content like movies from YouTube or Nextflix. I reached out immediately to Netgear support to see if there was anything they could do before I returned the modem.–NetGear Support..It took 45 minutes on hold to reach support but I waited (be nice if there was a call back). Finally, I reached support. I was surprised by the quality. The Netflix support engineer walked me through the diagnostics and she taught me how to read noise and power. The logs showed low power (dbmvs were too low at -13 when they should have been around -10), high noise, and lots of packet dropping on one of the channels. Interestingly, I began to suspect that the problem was either my electrical power or something with the Cable company and an electrician.–Call to the Cable Company…I called the cable company and was surprised that none of them could see the same diagnostics. I spoke with Level 3 (the highest tier) of support. They were surprised when I read the values to them. They understood the values and were knowledgeable but none of the Level 3 people’s systems included the level of depth that my Netgear router included. Time Warner/Spectrum decided to send someone out to my house. I also was proactive by scheduling an electrician before the visit.–The Electrician.The electrician came out and looked at all my volts, rating the power as excellent (122 to 125), and told me that electricity from my house was definitely not the problem for as small as a unit such as the Netgear cable modem.–The Time Warner/Spectrum TechnicianThis is where it got interesting. He completely rewired everything from my house to the outside connection. Time and time again, his system would show everything was fine but we would test the speed and get less than 100. We tried things out with my old Time Warner/Spectrum Modem and the Netgear Modem. While the old Time Warner Modem showed nothing, my Netgear Modem detected the issues.Eventually, he put his system down and started looking at the diagnostic screen from the Netgear Modem. We both realized that the Netgear diagnostics were more accurate than what the Time Warner/Spectrum team had (and they owned their network)!!!!–And here is where it gets interesting..Finally, he called one of the backend Time Warner/Spectrum engineers while I was there. He read the values that my Netgear system was giving. The backend Engineer asked for a few moments and checked his system. He came back and said that indeed, the diagnostics showed a “node” failure within the area but that they cannot pinpoint it. To get the speeds that they are getting, the cable providers have been switching to clustered nodes which increases the speed but makes it much harder to pinpoint the exact source of the issue. It appears as though the “speed arms race” has offset the gains with speed with much higher instability as cable providers rush to up the speeds for keeping customers. In other words, the networks are not as stable as they were previously.So, they told me a week ago that they would get back to me when they discovered the problematic node. I haven’t heard anything back.I learned one other scary thing. A lot of these cable providers set the speed per a channel. So, if you get 24 channels, you can go up to ultimate 300 but to go to the newly coming ultimate 500, you have to have 32 channels even if the cable modem is capable of going a lot faster. So, it’s important to check your default speed per a channel with your provider because there is a race to get up to 1GB currently which will involve a lot of channels.This made my 24 channel modem obsolete… in that ultimate 500 is coming out which requires more channels than this modem as currently 24 channels will only support Ultimate 300.So what is the story here.. why only 4 stars..The good..———-* Well, the good was the diagnostics.. I had better diagnostics than the internal Level 3 Spectrum technicians.* The features are so awesome — you can see who is causing wireless contention and even change the wireless channel to be faster. This especially works out for me because I could even see nearby restaurants causing contention on my wireless channel.The Bad..———-* The bad was the handling of the internet provider problems, which I suspect has caused some of the reviews. For whatever reason, this modem just doesn’t handle problematic nodes like other modems. I can at least use my cheap time warner cable/Spectrum TPLink modem with slower access. I couldn’t do anything with the Netgear one. This is a problem because the networks aren’t as stable as they were in the past. Having excellent diagnostics is extremely helpful in today’s time but I would have liked to see more internal error handling on the cable modem side to at least allow a user to still use the internet.* Spending all this money and getting outdated. Limits of speed per a channel by the cable provider. Now, 24 channels is already outdated. Right now, we have completion coming from AT&T, Time Warner Spectrum, Verizon, and Google Fiber (soon). Customers have choices and this is driving fast rollouts for all the providers without the quality control. Goodness.. It would be a good idea for a cable modem to advertise features such as error handling and what not because it is the reality and a key differentiator.I will return it because 24 channels is now outdated for my provider. But I will get another one when more channels are available. And while it didn’t work, it sure did help to finally see where the problem was at. I just wish that I could have got it going but maybe I will. 4 out 5 stars — excellent features, bad error handling that wasn’t their fault completely but should have been handled better (on the level of the other modem).

[Update: 07/05/21]The cheap, Chinese wall-wart power supply that comes with this router has no RFI (radio frequency interference) filtering whatsoever. As an amateur radio operator, I have been trying to locate a massive source of RFI in my house for a long time. I finally tracked it down to the lousy power supply that comes with this router! ARRIS is clearly using the absolute cheapest components in their routers and accessories. 50 cents worth of filtering could solve a huge RFI problem. I walked down the street with one of my radios and could hear the noise coming from this power supply on 14.273 MHz at the end of my road! As a part 15 device, the power supply may not (legal terminology for “must not”) cause any interference to other devices, yet it does. Terribly![Update 05/01/21]For the first time in weeks, I needed to change the configuration of my network. I used a web browser to navigate to the router’s dashboard and was met by an error message which said that accessing the dashboard from a wireless device was not permitted. Strange, since I’ve configured it from my laptop over WiFi literally dozens of times. I went to my desktop computer that’s connected to the router by an Ethernet cable and navigated to the dashboard. I typed in the username and password and got an “Alert” pop-up that said “Operation failed”. Not “incorrect password”, but “Operation failed”. I tried several times but always got the same error. I know with 100% certainty that the password was correct… I even cut and pasted it from a document that had the password in it. Two calls to India… I mean, to ARRIS resulted in them saying my ISP messed up a firmware update which was pushed to my router. The dashboard screen *was* different to the last time I tried to log in. Then I lost all internet connectivity. Three calls to my ISP, Cox Cable (one transferred to the wrong department, one disconnection after waiting 15 minutes on hold, third call lucky) later and I was told to factory reset the router because they could see it communicating with their back end system, but I had no internet. Of course, in their wisdom, ARRIS has removed the ability to backup and restore the router configuration from their routers, so after factory resetting it – twice, because the first attempt did not actually reset it – I had to totally reconfigure my network, with all the static IP addresses, for rewarded ports, etc. Hours later I was back up. 4 hours of work, lost. There is no guarantee that this will not happen again. But I’m able to login to the dashboard from my laptop again! This will be my last ARRIS router.[Update 04/01/21 – Not an April Fools joke!]Having reported the Port Forwarding issue to ARRIS technical support and gone through all their usual “Did you wash the windows and clean out the ashtray”-type questions, they acknowledged a problem in the GUI. I got a phone call from them today, nearly 3 weeks after initially reporting the problem, and they asked me to check the Port Forwarding page. Amazingly, the ports I had already configured now appeared in the GUI. Apparently, they fixed the issue, sent it to Cox Cable for their testing, and Cox pushed the firmware to my router. So now, Port Forwarding – in the GUI at least – works as expected. I haven’t checked the actual functionality of the new port forwarding code. Will update if it doesn’t work. The wifi is working properly now. The errors seemed to be caused by issues on the Cox Cable lines. After multiple calls to their technical support and after 2 Cox Cable technicians came to check the lines, a supervisor arrived and installed an amplifier in the line. I’m at the end of the line, furthest away from the Cox switch in the condo complex and my signal strength back to the switch was very low. Strange how no one could tell that before the supervisor came over and looked at the app on his cell phone which showed “Low Signal Strength” in bright red letters! Maybe no one else bothered to look? Anyway, the router is working properly now, with the exception that Cox Cable’s internet service has been going down repeatedly for the last few days. Sigh.[Previous update…]I got a replacement router sent to me by Amazon. The WiFi on the replacement unit works better than the first unit, but even yesterday I came home to find my Nest thermostat complaining that it had been offline for 6 hours and it took several attempts before it would reconnect. The thermostat is 8 feet from the router. Cox cable is doing ping tracing on my account to see how often my network goes down!The Good: I’m getting 950Mbps download fairly consistently on a wired connection to the router. I’m getting 400Mbps on my laptop and Samsung G21 phone over WiFi.The Bad: Wifi outages for no apparent reason. Port forwarding suffers from this router’s buggy firmware. Earlier reviews show this is nothing new, it’s been going on, unfixed, by ARRIS for at least 3 years. When you use the web gateway to create a forwarded port, it disappears from the GUI and you can never see it again. You can’t delete a forwarded port or see which ports have already been forwarded because the GUI won’t display them! I reported it to ARRIS and got the usual “Restore it to factory defaults” followed by “It will be fixed soon”. Speaking of “Restore to factory defaults”, in their great wisdom, ARRIS decided to remove from ALL of their routers, the ability to backup and restore the router configuration. In the past, you could backup all of your router’s configuration to a file on your computer. If support wanted you to reset the router, you could do so and, after resetting the router didn’t fix their buggy firmware, you could reload the backup into the router and be none the worse for wear. Not anymore. Now you’ll be spending hours redoing all the configuration after a factory reset. That was a really dumb idea, ARRIS.Would I recommend this router? I’m not sure. It seems all routers from all manufacturers have some kind of issue. It seems that most manufacturers really don’t care about providing a good customer experience or fixing bugs. I increased the rating from 1-star to 3-stars because the wifi is working (most of the time) on this replacement router and the wired Ethernet speed is quite fast.—-Previous version of this review:I got the router this afternoon and have spent 8 [update: 30 hours] hours trying to get it to work.Setup was pretty straightforward, I’ve had ARRIS routers before. My last one is still working fine, but I can’t use it because Cox cable decided to cut my upload speed by 60% and the only way I could get it back is by upgrading to Gigablast. Now that I’m on Gigablast, my old DOCSIS3.0 won’t work.I configured the router from the web portal (192.168.0.1) and set up the two wifi bands’ (2.4GHz and 5GHz) SSIDs and passwords. Some of my Wifi devices are locked to 2.4GHz, but guess what? The 2.4GHz band is shown as “Internet not available”.The 5GHz band worked, intermittently, but required me to delete all existing wifi connections before any device would work. Wifi range was abysmal – As in, it wouldn’t go through 2 walls in my 1,200 square foot condo. I called ARRIS support who, after saying the ONLY thing we could do to test the router was to reset it (losing all my settings, because unlike my former ARISS router, this one has no way to back up your settings and restore them!!). So reset it we did. There was still no wifi on 2.4GHz after the reset, so ARISS told me the “only” thing it could be, was that Cox didn’t provision the wifi section of the router! Right.I called Cox who checked and said the router was correctly provisioned. Three more calls to Cox (all disconnected at one point or other) and I was passed through to Advanced Support. They said, “If you can connect to the internet when connected to the router via an Ethernet cable [I can], and at least one device can connect to the internet when using wifi [one could], then Cox’s side of the equation is working. The problem lies in the ARRIS router.”To be sure it wasn’t my settings that were screwing things up, I did a full factory reset – AGAIN, a process that took nearly 10 minutes. After going through just the initial set-up wizard and entering the two wifi SSIDs and passwords… I now have **NO** wifi connection to the internet at all.A Cox technician is coming to my house with a similar router to double check that it’s not my wiring that’s causing the problem, but we already know it’s not. There is no reason why a router would work for direct Ethernet connections but not work with wifi connections, unless the router is faulty.

I got this since my old Modem-Router seemed to be doing bad, but after this one was too found out it was rodents chewing the internet wires outside. After the guy fixed have just 100MBS when should have 200.. oh well. Think he did something stupid to the cord. This modem was getting over 200 sometimes. But it fluctuated too much and went down to 2 sometimes because of the wire outside being exposed. Stupid rodents. Anyway still have this one plugged in.

I’ll cut to the chase. Plug it in then call your ISP provider to activate and provision the Arris G34. The PIN number on the bottom of the modem is not the password for the modem. You’ll find the password for the modem on a small square piece of paper in the box it came in. Once everything is up and running, you’ll hopefully be amazed. My Wi-Fi speed went from 400mbps all the way up to 700mbps where it should have been but my old modem couldn’t handle the speed. The Arris G34 has Wi-Fi 6 and docsis 3.1 which are the latest Wi-Fi standards. One thing you’ll have to get used to is the one and only light on the front of the modem. It changes color according to connection status. Blue means you’re online. Contrary to other reviews here on Amazon, my particular Arris G34 does not randomly disconnect. So far it’s been solid. The range seems to be pretty strong unless you have multiple devices connected. I typically have two iPhones, one iPad and an Apple Watch connected at the same time. If I go in the bedroom, the speed will typically drop about 50mbps which is par for the course in my apartment. So do I recommend it? Absolutely. The Arris G34 Router/Modem Combo is one of the best I’ve had. It’s a great modem/router combo for an affordable price.

I bought this modem after an internet tech came to my house to check on my sub-speed issue I was having following my purchase of another Netgear model (new modem #1). I messed around with the modem #1 for some time with marginal improvement in my speeds, so decided to bite the bullet and buy a second new modem per his recommendation and at least give it a try. This one is giving me speeds above the rating from my cable internet provider. This whole process has taken me over 6 mos, so now I can’t return the old modem. (I was past the allowable return window with modem #1). Bottom line, it is worth it. I spent a little over $300 for 2 modems but now have one that works well and has double the speeds I am able to get. I don’t know what the difference is between this one and Netgear C3700, which is more $$, but it works much better!

This was easy to install and works great. We’ve used it several months now and haven’t had any issues with it working as it should.

I was able to set it up myself in an hour or so. I checked my download speed, it went from 32 before to over 400 now. My internet speed, according to my cable carrier is 400.

The band steering I disabled while Going through the app I connect to the newer tech like tv, to the 5 g Use the 2.4 for older stuff like printer plus the printer is on another floor anyway. The 5 G covers the whole 1700 foot dual story house. So I run the iPhone x2 on the 5 G , have 35 devices connected. Of course they are not connected all the time but when I do use it , say like the thermostat etc which is not new enough to run anything on 5 G I pay for gig speed . Pull down load at 600mb for the most part. Solid. I like the firewall it notifies me if anything new try’s to connect. You can approve any connection either WiFi etc . You do have to go into the settings and reset of all devices to recognize the WiFi. to the new gateway. Still finding devices I hadn’t thought of . Like wall plugs for home automation for example and repair them to the new gateway WiFi. Usually all run at the 2.4 frequency due to age. I did this on Comcast and ditched the cable router network. Something about them charging me for the old unit that just didn’t sit well with me especially for paying premium high speed rates. Gig coverage cost about $ 120. 00 a month . I bought this 3.1 whatever that is instead of 3.0 . For future proofing as much as I could afford. This has WiFi 5 not the more expensive WiFi 6 which is almost double$$ Couldn’t afford that much future proof tech. This review done by.Awkward1

I upgraded to this device primarily because my internet data provider, COX, was requiring a DOCIS 3.1 capable modem in order to upgrade or change my data service. I had been using an earlier Netgear ORBI system that was only DOCIS 3.0 compatible. After making the switch, the increase in my internet data speed was staggering. I have the same COX data plan as before, Internet Ultimate with 500 MBPS download speeds, but my internet speeds have increased from 334.46 MBPS to 546.12 MBPS, an over 63% speed increase, with no change to my data plan. Really outstanding. I have a 2400 SF home so with the base unit and the satellite provided I have fantastic coverage. As far as installation goes, it was pretty much unplug and disconnect the old modem, plug in and connect the new modem to my cable coming in, and set it up using the ORBI app on my phone. Then I had to call COX tech support to have them enter the MAC Address and Serial Number of the new modem. And with that I was up and running. I am extremely pleased.

This modem was very easy to set up on Spectrum’s network from my home. No need to call anyone as everything was handled through setup home devices over a web browser. No app to setup either. Connection seems very stable and as strong as we expect it to be. Only glitch is that (based on the colors of front icons changing between blue and green) the upload channel is not always at full strength/stability, but everything seems to work. Price was excellent given everything. I hope it lasts as long as my last Motorola cable modem.