As you know we hate the Comcast modems and have had to add a router to our modem to get better performance out of it and better connections...
We eventually went with the D-Link DCM-301 to compliment our 4500 and improved the performance and reliability from the Comcast Arris modem...
Some friends of ours were experiencing the same issue with their Comcast modem, but couldn't afford an Expensive Router or the Surfboard modem to replace the crappy Comcast Modem, so we had to make what they had work the best it could with the resources that were available to us...
There is not just one way set it up and done scenario here and after investigating this for a few months we found a few different ways to make your browsing experience better and more secure...
Okay, so there are a few ways that you should/could setup your modem/routers...
Bridging the Home or Work modem is the preferred method, the only difference is which will serve as the DHCP server...
Our DLINK has great security in it and is much better than the Cable Home/Work modem so using the DLINK as the DHCP/Firewall is preferred, but you still bridge at the Cable Modem...
If you use DHCP on your Router, you'll need to turn off DHCP on your Modem because you CANNOT have two DHCP servers running on the same network regardless if you have different subnets or not...
Work Modems are typically better than Home modems so if you have a cheap Linksys router it's best to use the DHCP on the Cable Modem...
You can use the Linksys as the DHCP server if you want on your home network, but it's better to use the Work modem as the DHCP modem because it's better than the home modem...
Using the Cheap Linksys router is best to set it up as an Access point only, but you have to use the same subnet as the Cable Modem. You also have to either reserve or remove the Static IP that is given to the Linksys from the Cable Modem DHCP...
The Linksys access point SSID should be named differently than the Cable modem. This way you can have your underlings use this router while your preferred users use the Cable Modem SSID...
You can also use a different password than the Cable modem to keep them off of the Cable modem, plus it shares the load for Wireless connections so you can host more users...
DO NOT give any information to the Guest users because your still on the main subnet and can see whatever is shared, so a security issue...
With the DLINK we had to change the subnet and use a 192.168.xx.xx and 10.0.xx.xx on the Cable Modem, which is standard...
We had mass errors using the Same Subnet as the Cable modem and it would also disconnect very often, but once we changed to 192.168.xx.xx it ran much better....
Our DLINK is preferred to use an alternate Subnet and is setup that way with DLINK as well like that...
If your router has Wireless and is used as the DHCP you will have to disable the Wireless on the Cable Modem...
This was a fun exercise and we hope that you get some use out of it...
**UPDATE**
Well four days ago the DLINK freaked out :-D, not sure why, so we are trying something else...
When we bridged the Modem with the Router and used the Same IP, we found ourselves having to reconnect quite frequently and was why we switched the IP to 192.xx on the DLINK...
So we know that we can't go back to this configuration, so we are trying something a bit different, but kind of the same as one of the other solutions in this study...
What we did now is disable the bridge on the Cable Modem, we used the same IP as the Cable modem, we enabled the WiFi connections on both the cable modem and the router to create a load balancing...
When enabling two Wireless devices in the same environment it's best to have them on different channels, so we made DLINK channel 1 and Cable Modem Channel 6...
We also needed to keep the same IP on the DLINK as the cable modem because we couldn't get it to stay stable with alternate IP's nor would it go above 1Mbps, probably because we removed bridging...
We have split the Wireless users to 5 on the DLINK and 5 on the Cable Modem, but there is no doubt that the DLINK is the faster connection and most stable compared to the POS Cable Modem...
The Cable modem has frozen a few users while on SKYPE, but the DLINK has not interrupted once and has stayed connected at 48Mbps now for the last two days...
Still testing...
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