How to save money on your cable modem costs

A cable modem’s lights blinking can represent not just data flowing into your house but money flowing out of your bank account.

How much? Probably more than what you paid a year ago to rent the same cable modem, much less three or four years back. Consider the cablemodem fees at the three biggest cable internet providers in the most recent quarter, per Leichtman Research: Comcast, Charter (sold under the Spectrum brand) and Cox.

Comcast’s Xfinity service now charges $14 a month – up from $13 a year ago, versus $11 two years ago, compared to $10 in 2017 and $8 before then.

Spectrum still doesn’t charge for a modem – which meant that Time Warner Cable customers saw their old $10/ month fee go away when Charter bought that firm – but it now invites customers to rent a Wi-Fi router from them, labeled as a $5 Wi-Fi service fee.

Cox charges $10.99 a month, up from its former $7.99 rate that was a modest increase from $6.99 in 2017.

These firms uniformly tout their work to bring such improvements as faster Wi-Fi with better parental controls, although Comcast and Cox also now use the modems they lease to provide Wi-Fi bandwidth to nearby subscribers. None of those firms offered numbers about how many customers have bought their modems, although Comcast did say that most still rent.

Frontier (not a cable operator, but a phone-based telco) charges customers a fee for using their own router and will do so until a last passed last year takes effect in December. Buying a modem doesn’t have to be hard. But as I learned when I did this for my in-laws last summer, it may involve extra steps to find a modem supporting the services you use.

Things are simplest if you only get broadband (TV service makes no difference) from your cable operator and don’t have their fastest connection. Check their lists of supported modems – see, for example, Comcast’s and Cox’s – and buy whatever’s readily available, at a cost of maybe $70 and change.

That’s the scenario usually addressed in reviews of cable modems at such sites as Wirecutter (a New York Times-owned site to which I contribute) and PCMag. But if you get gigabit service, you’ll probably need a more expensive modem supporting a standard called DOCSIS 3.1, a newer version of the DOCSIS 3.0 almost all cable operators require. At Comcast, for example, DOCSIS 3.1 cut the number of compatible modems from 35 to 12, as reported at its mydeviceinfo.xfinity.com site for a Bay Area address.

If you get phone service from your cable operator, you’ll also need to buy a modem supporting that. At the same Comcast site, checking “Voice/Telephone enabled” cut the original list of 35 modems to 12. Specifying DOCSIS 3.1 plus phone support left just two.

Finally, if you’re replacing a modem with built-in Wi-Fi and don’t want to have two separate boxes, you’ll need to purchase a modem with its own wireless router.