Another product review...

Telstra, or Telecom Australia as it used to be called, seems to have been distributing Motorola Surfboard modems to a lot of it's new broadband cable customers and I've had the opportunity to use a few of them. My experiences have unfortunately been more in the troubleshooting range rather than 'sit back and enjoy' however.

On the positive, these modems are indeed simple enough to set up and they work within their parameters, most of the time anyway. They do however have some distinct problems.

The adventure started with my mate's new iBook. He wanted to connect it via ethernet, so he unplugged the ethernet cable from the back of the pc, plugged it into the iBook and voila! Nothing. We tried with a new profile. No go. Pulled my hair out for ages before turning off the modem at the power source and leaving it for 5 minutes did the trick. The modems have a habit of 'marrying' themselves to their current pc and won't detect a new connection. Just cost cutting I presume. The non-wifi models do not seem to have any web-interface either, so configuration of any sort is a no-go.

My second adventure with one of these modems was with a Motorola SBG900. Wifi router-ethernet-modem all in one.

This problem confused me for a long time. I reset the admin password for a bit of security, but found after a while that I could no longer log in. I thought I'd forgotten the password, but then read a forum post saying that it forgets passwords and will refuse any password after that. True enough, I manually reset it to factory settings and reset the password. Then the modem forgot that password. It seems to only remember it's password as long as it is the default password, 'motorolla'. Great. Either allow anyone who can hack the wifi access to re-configure the modem, or set everything up with static ip addresses and limited wifi access etc, reset the password, kiss access goodbye as it forgets the password and wait til someone in the house needs to connect a new PSP or laptop before a good old factory reset and doing it all again...

In conclusion? Unless all you want to do is connect one PC and leave it forever, go to MSY and buy your own modem/router if your ISP of choice is only offering these modems. They are not worth the trouble.