Motorola releases $350 box: cable modem, Ethernet switch, printer sharing: This device is being sold directly via big-box computer retailers. It's unclear to me which consumers buy their own cable modems; it's more likely that cable operators will offer this as an option or upgrade.
Glenn,
Enjoy your Blog and read it regularly. As for the motorola SBG-100. I have been looking at this device and thinking of making the jump. You can already find it for sale online for 215$ with 14$ shipping. Even at this lower price, at first blush it seems expensive compared to 5 bucks a month modem rental from the cable company. But when you factor in $100 for your own Access Point and $5 a month for additional IP addresses ( Cox Cable's charge ), it begins to get justified. Add a firewall and a print server and it looks really good. I am waiting on SOMEBODY (CNET, ZDnet) to review this thing and say it lives up to promises before I buy.
With the spread of the DOCSIS cable modem standard, more and more consumers are buying their own modems, rather than leasing them from the cable company.
General idea: If you don't lease your television from the cable company, why lease your cable modem?
The DOCSIS standard is the key - more robust features and it will commoditize the cable modems and turn them into multifunction peripherals for the home gateway - running your utilities will be next :-)
The SBG1000 product data sheet on the Motorola site (here http://www.motorola.com/mdirect/pdf/SBG1000_Data_Sheet.pdf) says it supports "up to 253 Ethernet users and 5 wireless users." Can this be a misprint, or is this thing really that restrictive?