Buy your own cable modem. Here's a list of sanctioned Comcast cable modems and another similar list of approved cable modems for Comcast. These URLs were hard for me to find from the main comcast site.
Hunt around and you can find one for $20-$40, which beats paying $10/month or so. I used Craig's list and got one for $20 (the guy was asking $15 but all I had was a $20 bill). I got a Thomson (RCA) DCM425. Works great. Has several blinky lights. Got this back in Feb 2009.
I should really pick up a second one in case the first one dies.
In fact, I told this tactic to the Comcast service guy setting up our connection and even he was paying the monthly rental for his modem. After our little talk, he was going to rectify that situation immediately. The guy's not an idiot. Huzzzah.
(Update: 07 Sep 2009) My RCA modem died suddenly on me the other night. I thought it was a Comcast outage but the next morning when it was still out I called Camcast and after a bit of reseting the line and power cycling at my end, we decided it was likely a bad modem. To my chagrin, I discovered, I really miss being connected. So we rented a modem from Comcast (a new Motorola SB5120) and sure nuff, it was bad modem. That night I couldn't get the rental modem to actually connect without going through some dubious download of McAfee software so I called Comcast back up and the woman said "I don't know why they (the earlier Comcast rep) don't tell you (the customer) that you have to call back when you get your new modem". After a bit of trial and error we finally got it working.
The moral was:
- Power cycle the modem with it unconnected to any ethernet but with it connected to the cable. Wait for it to get a connection.
- Hook up your router or computer to the modem.
- Go from there. And be careful your brower isn't serving a cached page if you get something unexpected.
I'll hook this up sometime when we can afford to not have internet so we can return the rental unit.
