Home > Consumer Reviews > Zoom 5241 Cable Modem USB Ethernet

We suffered for two or three years with two Comcast provided Motorola Surfboard modems. Finally as my wife's complaining and accusing looks got worse, it occurred to me I could throw out vendor-provided equipment and get customer-provided equipment. I needed to assign the new MAC address for the modem, and I initially called up Comcast, but after waiting for their rep, and then getting lost when he put me on hold (what's new?), I figured what the heck, and ran Comcast's setup utility on my computer. I managed to muddle my way through, and after a month the Zoom modem has worked flawlessly. No more lost connections, and I've got a fairly complicated system of a Vonage adapter and two routers. Actually, here's the system that works for me: 1) The Zoom modem, 2) A Linksys BEFSX41 firewall/router as a DHCP Server, 3a) one port on the BEFSX41 to a Vonage Linksys Adapter, and 3b) another port on the BEFSX41 to a Linksys Router/wireless adapter in my home office that hooks to two computers, which in turn serve printers. I keep 1, 2, and 3a along with all household phone connections in a closet, so the equipment and cables don't clutter up my home office. I have ethernet/cable/phone cables running from the closet to wall outlets in several different rooms. Everything works in this configuration. I recommend the Zoom cable modem as an economical and robust alternative to vendor-provided hardware. I recommend not to bother renting equipment like this that's cheap anymore. If it stops working, I like no inhibition about buying new hardware and not depending on a tedious customer service process to muddle through my trouble ticket, sometimes for days or weeks, often with unsatisfactory resolution. Vendors too often think intermittent service is just fine if it happens to be working when they check it.

I purchased this cable modem after the Motorola modem provided by Comcast broke.

This modem has worked perfectly so far. It was simple to set up. All I had to do was unplug my old modem and switch the cables from the old modem to the new modem.

The Zoom 5241 modem is slightly warm to the touch after it has been plugged in for awhile. All of its status lights are bright green and the "link" light blinks when the modem is properly connected.

This modem should be able to work with a variety of cable modem providers. Comcast tried to tell me that this modem would not work with their service. However, the technician I talked to was incorrect and this modem works perfectly.

Who makes a good cable modem? Well, for years, I've been sold on the big names like Motorola, Linksys, etc. I always thought that the 'Surfboard' line from Motorola had the most impressive stats out of the box, and worked the best. Recent problems with a new Motorola modem in the home office, however, had me on the lookout for a new alternative. When the big chain office store employee told me that this modem was the one my cable company recommended, I thought I would give it a try. I wasn't disappointed.

This modem connected with my ISP (CableOne) immediately, which is a first, since usually I have to call them and update them with a new MAC address when I get a new modem. Never have I had a modem which connected so fast and simply right out of the box. I don't connect directly to this modem either, but I used a new wireless router of which I also began to be impressed by. This was all done on my MacBook Pro, of which being a Mac newbie, I wasn't sure what to expect.

Overall, even though I am experiencing signal issues (verified by the cable company) this modem is very fast relative to all others I have used. It is sturdy, dependable, and quick to reconnect in power outages or simple cable signal issues. This is definitely the best, most vigillant little communications box I have used to date, and I am impressed with the speed it communicates and reconnects to the ISP when it has issues, as well as the speed of data I get on downloads.

If you do a lot of uploads, I cannot vouch for that bit of info, as I don't do pretty much at all during normal usage.

Overall, I'm impressed with this little guy. Highly recommended.

Plug and play. No increase in speed but that's expected if you understand the technology in your environment. I tried two Linksys CM100's but neither worked (maybe my service providers fault), but this Zoom and my old no-name modem work fine. FYI - my service provider is Ygnition and I live in an apartment in DFW.

My old modem was a Dlink DCM-201 which I had for about 3 years before it started to intermittently stop detecting the cable connection.
I suspect it might have had something to do with DOCSIS compliance, since the old modem was only compatible with the 1.1 standard and i believe Comcast has been upgrading their connections.
After replacing my modem with the Zoom 5241, according to tests run from speedtest.net, I went from a download speed of 3171 kb/s and upload speed of 965 kb/s to 8115 kb/s download and 1460 kb/s upload.
The only thing i needed to do was connect the power, ethernet, and cable, and call comcast and tell them i had replaced a modem and for them to record the new MAC address that was printed on the label on the side of the modem. The whole process took 10 minutes.

Its been running for 1 week now like a champ.