At home we're still using the ancient Motorola cable modem. it 'just works'. At g/f's place, it's ADSL, i've used a few different modem's there, BT Voyager's (wired and wireless), i recently replaced the Voyager wireless with a Buffalo with dd-wrt on, works much better than the Voyagers, whether wired or wireless. And on the river i used to use my trusty old D-Link 504-T, which was 100% stable other than hanging once a week almost to the hour. The 504-T is making up for the hanging behaviour by acting as a dumb switch these days :)
Originally posted by sammorris: Isn't the WRT54G just a router though, not a modem? Routers are fine, but the modems are VERY hard to get right, a friend is telling me to try a Netgear DG834G...
People don't usually go around replacing modems. In fact you really can't just buy one and plug it in. Your ISP supplies you with one because their networks are built to use a specific one. What a modem does is it syncs the flow of traffic from your end to the ISP's end.
It basically has whats called a clock rate configured into it and it uses that to sync transmissions. I might be wrong about this but your end is called a DTE and the ISP's end is called a DCE?
I know that link sys and some other companies do make modems but I remember a while back I bought a modem off of my ISP so I wouldn't have to pay the modem rental fee, then I switched ISP's and they said I had to use their modem I couldn't use mine. Also Cable is a shared medium so the modem also makes sure that your ok to transmit and converts your data into a stream that can travel on coaxial. DSL is not a shared medium so all that modem does is convert your data into a stream that travels on the phone lines.
I don't know If you see a service difference by using different modems
Tell you that they might have, but honestly, as long as your modem supports the ADSL standard you use, you can use any, that is my experience. A modem my ISP told me was incompatible with my service isn't, on two separate occasions...
