SB8200

Hello fellow Amazon Prime members! I wanted to give a review on the Arris G20 Cable Modem Router Combo and I must say, this modem is AMAZING! I was doing a lot of research for the past few months because I needed a newer modem to be able to do the things I wanted to do. This modem by Arris offers all that and more! The installation was super easy! I have Xfinity and setting it up through Xfinity app was a breeze! Even though the Arris G20 looks small, it packs a punch delivering robust speeds to the internet with it's Wifi 6 technology! This modem gives you both 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz! The key features I was looking for in a modem was "would I be able to control it through the Arris Surfboard app itself" and it does! I can't begin to tell you all the other reviews I read on other brands and models that people was not happy with! Before buying this model, I had purchased a Motorola MG8702 and it was a fail for me, no network support, no ability to control settings through the app, nothing, lol! Then comes along the Arris G20 Surfboard! You can set up profiles for your entire family and this is really helpful if you have kids! You can set time limits, add their gadgets, turn the internet off and on when you need to and just simple to use parental controls all through the app! All in all, this is a really good modem, you won't be disappointed! Ok, time for some NFL NFC AFC Championship 🏆 Football Sunday💪🏈 Thank you Amazon🥳 Ok, have to go guys! Have a wonderful, safe and blessed day! ☺️🙏

UPDATE 3 ************** You can read my sad tale below if you choose. But a quick summary may suffice. I got the SB8200 and it worked for 58 days. It then stopped working. It was replaced by Arris but the second modem did not work, either. That modem was replaced by Arris and the third modem did not work. The odds of getting three bad modems were pretty near zero so attention turned to Comcast. A tech came out and confirmed that the SNR was way low and the signal levels were out of bounds. He ran a new cable to the Comcast distribution box and installed a new splitter. The third modem connected immediately and worked perfectly. The fact that my old modem (not a docsis 3.1) worked had initially suggested that the problem was the new modem instead of the Comcast line. Arris support was GREAT through all this. I got right through to a live tech after about 3-5 rings (after their voice menu system answered and directed my call). They replaced the modems quickly (I had to send old modem back via ground - free return shipping - but they sent replacement modem via next day delivery). This is some of the best support of any company I deal with. It is pretty much the opposite of Comcast where getting to a live agent can be very difficult. This review was originally a 2 star but is now a 5 star - and I would give Arris support 6 stars if I could. ORIGINAL POST ********************* I have had this modem for 58 days. It was working well connected to Xfinity. Good download speed. Then, today it became intermittent. It ran for a couple of minutes, then lost internet connection, then was back but at slower download speed. Then it was running fine. That pattern continued to repeat. I had hoped it was an Xfinity issue, but I reconnected my previous modem and everything is working just fine. Before purchase I had read the bad reviews, but there were way more good reviews so I hoped that I would be one of those customers that got a "good one". Nope. Besides EVERY modem I looked at had about the same number of bad reviews. Many saying - don't buy this. So what is one to do? UPDATE ************** I contacted Arris customer support. I got through to a tech IMMEDIATELY. He said they needed to check the modem while it was online. Since I had already installed by backup modem, I had to contact Comcast and switch my MAC address back to the Arris and get in connected. I then called Arris back and again was connected to a tech, immediately. The reason this is a 2 star rather than a 1 star is because of the ease of contacting support. The tech looked at the modem stats and agreed it was bad. After a 5 minute delay while he consulted with a supervisor, he approved my return of the modem. He emailed me a prepaid shipping label and said they would send a new modem to me as soon as they received the old one back. So what Arris may lack in quality, they do mostly make up for in good customer support. Realistically, any product can fail, so the experience in dealing with a failed product is an important part of the buying process. Arris support gets 4 stars from me - one star off for making me reinstall the modem so they can verify it was bad. Though that was a perfectly reasonable request from them, I had pretty good evidence of my assertion that it was their modem which was the issue. Update 2 ********** I got the replacement modem. I spent about 90 minutes on the phone with Xfinity and Arris customer support trying to get that modem working with Xfinity. We could not get the modem to work - it seemed like it was working for a few seconds here and there. So I am sending this replacement back and will get yet another replacement (for the replacement). Hopefully the 3rd times the charm.

I replaced a just over 1 year old Netgear Nighthawk CM2500 modem that was dropping speed and needing to be reset three or four time a week. The Arris was super easy to set up with my Spectrum service and seems durable. I have a seperate router setup and the range has not been affected. he speeds have been back to what I would expect. I have not had any heat issues with the unit as some have stated and the streaming capability works with multiple devices without issue.

BUYER BEWARE: This product being a DOCSIS 3.1 Modem seemed to be safe and solid when I purchased last year on Amazon.com. Little did I know that problems would gradually start to increase with the Arris Surfboard SB8200, and seems to be an unfortunate pattern I have found with Arris Brand Cable Modems and Gateways. Customer Support is lacking and avoids addressing the issue while frequently diverting from the main problem they are asked to assist with. Arris brand products I have experienced continue to demonstrate noticeable defects and appear to be made with poor quality parts. I have purchased the Arris SB8200, SGB8300, SB6190 and SB6183 Cable Modems and Gateways and this is particularly if you have Cox Communications for an ISP, it is wise to reconsider this brand if you want a reliable internet connection and service. I strongly suggest you steer clear from this brand! The SBG8300, SB6183 and SB6190 all exhibited problems from the start, but this Surfboard SB8200 was particularly deceiving, since on the surface it seems that it would be a top performing product being DOCSIS 3.1 and not made with the Puma 6 Chipset some of us had the misfortune of experiencing defects with. I have now found this SB8200 device to be useless after 6 months and hours and hours troubleshooting with Arris customer support via chat, phone and email. You will be out of options when this product starts to fail, which for me is outside the return time frame with Amazon and Arris will refuse to take any type of accountability or responsibility for this failing product. The numbers of issues faced with this defective product has been extremely frustrating and caution a prospective buyer of this DOCSIS 3.1 modem to reconsider. Do yourself a favor, choose another brand Modem or Gateway. Anything with this brand made within the last 5 years I have noticed lacks basic performance and will begin to exhibit these issues and defects no later than 6 months into operation. I suspected it was my Internet Service Provider or Router that was the problem at first when I began to have increased and unexpected as well as unexplained internet outages. Knowing Cox had a history of preferring Arris brand equipment, I never suspected I would encounter problems with their products. After I could not ignore the unexplained connection drops and unusual amount of internet outages I finally uncovered this cable modem was the culprit, however was too late to recover the investment. It wasn't until a Cox technician noticed the unusually slow and odd way this modem rebooted after a connection drop and told me he had nothing but problems with this brand of equipment he never encountered with the others. I began to look into the problems with this product, and started to see a noticeable pattern of dissatisfaction from customers like myself. I have replaced this cable modem now with the Motorola MB8600 and had success with the modem and absolutely no issues since purchasing it. The MB8600 worked right out of the box, which I cannot speak for it down the road, but already seems more promising that any of the Arris brand products I have unfortunately purchased in the past. I thought I would provide a review on this product as I am able to speak now to the longevity of this Arris Cable Modem model SB8200 and a few other Arris products that failed prior to this one. This investment I made was a big mistake so hopefully this can help you make an informed decision which I strongly caution you all with purchasing this product.

I purchased the Arris SB8200 for Xfinity Gigabit Internet service as they have a deal for two years for the same price as the 400Mbps plan ($69.99). So in order to save almost $15 a month I decided to buy my own modem to replace my aging Motorola (Arris) SB6141. My SB6141 netted me 259Mbps down and 35Mbps up on my previous plan of 400Mbps down and 35Mbps up, which is great for a 8x4 channel Docsis 3.0 cable modem. So since Arris bought Motorola modem cable division I decided to get another one having had a great product with the 6141. The Arris SB8200 is also the only Docsis 3.1 modem with two Ethernet ports capable of doing 2Gbps down and is the most future proof of any modem on the market at the time of writing this review. And you can get a refurbished model for half the price which is even better! Inside the Arris SB8200 is a Broadcom BCM3390 chipset (a much needed change from the SB6190’s Intel Puma 6 chipset which had hardware bugs and caused them a lawsuit for good measure), 3GB of RAM, 128MB S34ML01G200TFV00 Spansion flash memory NAND and 16MB Macronix MX25L12805D SPI NAND flash memory. The SB8200 is capable of downstream bonded channels up to 32 SCQAM or 2 OFDM and upstream bonded channels up to 8 SCQAM or 2 OFDMA (32x8 SCQAM and 2x2 OFDM). The Ethernet ports are only Gigabit Ethernet and therefore the Max you will get is 950Mbps average down and it will never be possible to the the boxes 10Gbps selling spiel. Even if you don't have Docsis 3.1 in your area or a Gigabit internet speed plan this modem will serve you for many years to come. And this modem has 3GB of RAM, which the other Docsis 3.1 modems have 256MB or less! RAM! Oh and with most providers (Xfinity included) you can call them and add a separate IP address for the second Ethernet port for a small fee (Xfinity charges like $5.95 if I'm remembering correctly). This would be great if you wanted to connect a gaming console directly to the modem for the best speeds and then connect your home router to the second. And eventually you'll be able to kick in 2Gbps by merging those two Ethernet ports! Setup of the device was quick and easy and you simply plugin the coxial cable, Ethernet cable to your device (router for 99% of the people) and power cable and you are off and running. A quick call to your internet provider (Xfinity for me) to add the HFC MAC address and the modem is registered and provisioned and I'm up and running within ten minutes. Xfinity will try to send out a tech but you can get them to override it if you know what you are doing. Gigabit internet can be extremely temperamental as we'll discuss later which is the reason Xfinity requires sending out a tech on all Gigabit plan installs. And again this is simply a modem so you will need a router if you want wifi or the ability to connect more than one device. The performance of the Arris SB8200 is top notch and I was easily able to pull my provisioned modem speeds from my Xfinity service. I was able to test 1.4Gbps down (Fast.com also includes backend speed as actual can only be 950Mbps as I mentioned above) and 45Mbps up. On Speedtest.net my tests are almost always 930-960Mbps (or near that) down and 40-50Mbps up. These speeds are AMAZING and just my upload speed is faster than most people's download speeds! Right now Xfinity is only utilizing Docsis 3.1 for the downstream channels so the modem lights will have a blue light for downstream and a green light for upstream (this is not an error or bug). My issues arose with my Xfinity service and resets, slow speeds (300Mbps Max down), etc. Xfinity sent out a tech and that did nothing. So another rech came and found a ton of ingress coming from 4 lines on my tap. He trapped them off and I was up and running with Gigabit speeds again. Then the resets started, at night almost every 10 minutes! It was only happening between 10pm and 7am average, EVERY NIGHT! I had more techs out, supervisors and more supervisors! After a month (and many hours of my time and speaking up) the issue was resolved as it was a bad line amplifier which was causing noise and caring my upstream to spike into the high 50s, which triggers resets on the modem and t3/t4 errors. Now my neighbors were having issues on certain channels and slow internet but their modems WERE NOT RESETTING! And we knew my modem wasn't bad as it was fine for over 12 hours a day with no errors at all in the log until night began to fall everyday. And In fact my neighbors never lost internet, EVER but my internet was almost useless at night time. So the Arris SB8200 is extremely sensitive to t3/t4 errors and the threshold for errors and resets is much higher for the Xfinity owned gateways and modems. Also Arris had out out a firmware update previously about severe sensitivity to t3/t4 errors and I had the latest version but I was still having issues so they still need to work on this. If you are experiencing issues with your Arris modem navigate to http://192.168.100.1 and you'll be able to see basic signal information, modem error logs, modem and firmware info. You can use this information and post it in the support forums to get help and diagnose any problems. But now that the line and backend errors are corrected it's smooth sailing and I'm saving myself a ton of money (the new Xfinity modem charge is $14 plus tax and it will be $15 by the beginning of 2020 so you pay for the modem in a little over a year) every year and you'll have the newest technology that is even better than the Xfinity modems and gateways, many of which use the Puma 6 chipset which I mentioned above (causing severe lag and timeouts which can kill online gaming or video watching). So I'm paying $69.99 and getting Gigabit speeds of 950Mbps down and 48Mbps up which is a great deal hands down and you won't find speeds that cheap ANYWHERE ELSE! The Arris brand is keeping the Motorola spirit alive and kicking which is great for competition! The Arris SB8200 is the best modem you can buy for your money right now and if you can find a refurbished unit on Amazon even better (they didn't have any when I bought mine but three weeks later they did and for $100 cheaper)!

The most important thing: It works. Our old Modem was going kaput and we needed a replacement. We checked with our Internet Provider to make sure it would be compatible. This was the one they recommended over all others. It was easy to hook up and the price was good. The signal is strong and reaches further than the old modem. 4 months since purchase and there have been no problems. We are very satisfied.

Arris surfboard is the best cable modem you can buy. I had one for 7 years and it just now died so I replaced it with another one. I found that this modem is the most stable out of all the ones I've seen in the past. There's not a lot of bells and whistles but it is a workhorse. All you have to do is replace the cable modem and call your cable provider with the MAC address that's listed on the cable modem then you're done. I have gone almost a year without ever power cycling or doing anything to the unit, and every time I did have to reboot it it was recommended that rebooted it but the root cause of its failure was not the cable modem it was the cable provider.

Great replacement for the Optimum rental modem! Easy setup, and it's working perfectly. Just remember, you will need to pair this with your own separate router. No issues so far—very happy with the purchase.