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bike Motorola SURFboard Gateway SBG6580 Wireless

Alright, so my Comcast internet went from 18 mbps to 26 mbps download and approximately 6mbps to 5mbps upload (I'm wireless on this). There's less wires and clutter now that I have one box.

Having said that, this is not for the faint of heart. I had to log in and straighten out the following problems:

1. Android phone (Motorola Droid Bionic) would not connect (didn't check my wife's iphone4)
2. PS3 would not connect
3. MacBook pro would not connect
4. PC would not connect
5. VPN would not connect

Here's what I did today, following what others said to do in the reviews, and my own tweaking:

Step 1: Provision with Comcast and Upgrade
- Call Comcast and ask them to both provision your new modem and push the latest firmware (SBG6580-3.5.8.2-GA-00-488-NOSH as of the date of this review).
- Hard restart the modem (pull out the power from the back, wait 30 seconds, then plug it back in, rep should ask you to do that)

Step 2: Get your PC up and running (this solved my PC connection issue)
- Plug an ethernet cable to your laptop and plug it into any of the four ports in the back of the modem.
- Try to surf to any site. If this doesn't work, click Start, type "cmd" (no quotes) in the search bar in the bottom, and you should get the command prompt. Type "ipconfig /release" (again, no quotes), and then "ipconfig /renew". You should now be able to surf to any site.

Step 3: Change your device's Wireless Settings (resolves Android phone issue and PS3 issue)
- Open a web browser of your choice and type (...)
- At the login screen, type "admin" for username, and "motorola" for password.
- At the top of the link, choose the "Wireless". Leave all options alone - in particular, leave 802.11 band at "2.4 GHz" - raising it to 5 GHz blocked my phone from seeing the wifi entirely. I could literally toggle between the options and watch wifi disappear on my phone.
- Next, on the left, click on "Primary Network". You can change the Network Name and WPA Pre-Shared Key (your password) to something easier than the default (found on a sticker at the bottom of the modem).
- On the far right is an option for Automatic Security Configuration. The dropdown menu has "WPS" and "Disabled" as your option - choose "Disabled", as enabling this blocks the PS3 from connecting to the network (although unlike the Android, you'll be able to see it, just not connect). This solves the PS3 connectivity issue.

Step 4: Change Firewall Settings (helped with my VPN client)
- This resolved VPN issues, my VPN client wasn't getting through.
- At the top menu, click on Firewall and then make Firewall setting "low" or "medium" ("high" will kill it).
- If IP Flood detection is checked off here, uncheck this as this was known to give problems.

Step 5: Connecting macbook pro
- MacBook was finding the network and acting like it connected, but when trying to surf the web, it would claim it was offline.
- Turned out the DNS settings were not updating properly, and this had to be configured manually on the mac (I've seen this on other wifi networks with the macbook pro, I think this is a bug with the mac's wifi provisioning utility.
- While logged in to your modem (remember, it's (...), login: admin, password: motorola), click "Basic" on the top nav menu and then look for "IPv4 DNS Servers". Write that down somewhere, especially the one listed at the Primary.
- On your macbook, click on the wifi icon on your macbook, choose "Open Network Preferences", click the "Advanced" tab on the bottom right, then click "DNS". Click the plus sign to add a DNS manually. Mine was 75.75.75.75

Since this is my first day with the device, I'll come back and subtract stars if I start seeing frequent resets as has been the complaint with older software revs of this device.

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