A few days ago, I got an e-mail from Rogers saying that I had to swap my cable modem/router for my Rogers Ignite Gigabit Internet for a new one within the next 30 days or so. That got my attention, so I unplugged my existing modem/router and took it to my local Rogers store for whatever new one that they were offering. I got this in exchange for my old modem/router: 
Meet the Hitron CODA-4582 modem. It looks like a copy of an Apple AirPort Extreme router. A cheap copy. Enough on the looks front. If you at the back, nothing much has changed:
You get four gigabit Ethernet ports and a USB port for hooking up a USB disk. If you want to use it as your router and leverage the built in WiFi, there will be no worries there. It supports 802.11ac WiFi. I disabled that functionality along with the routing capabilities as I only run cable and DSL modems in bridge mode so that I can use my own router. A couple of notes on that:
- To set up the modem/router, you connect to a WiFi SSID that ends in the word “EasyConnect” and walk through the setup of the WiFi portion of the modem/router. The modem/router then reboots and it’s live at that point. You should make a note of whatever password that you use to set up the WiFi as you’ll need it shortly.
- You then have to log in to disable the WiFi and routing functions. The username is still “cusadmin” (without the quotes). But what Rogers has done is made the login password for the modem/router the same as whatever password you used to set up the WiFi above. That makes the modem/router more secure.
- You can then click “Basic” and under “Gateway Function” click disable.
The modem/router will then reboot and you’re in bridge mode. Just a thought, you should just be able to put it into bridge mode from the get go. That would save me a whole lot of time. Another note, you can still log into the modem/router if you have to by going to 192.168.100.1.
But the big deal is found under the hood:
- It has the Intel Puma 7 chipset which should make this modem perform much better than Rogers previous modems which tended to have Puma 6 chipsets. That means faster Internet for you because there’s less latency in this chipset and it will support up to 10Gbps speeds downstream. The former was a major problem for Rogers users who played online games on Rogers Internet. Those users often complained about lag and latency while trying to pwn their opponents. With this modem/router, this shouldn’t be an issue anymore.
- It is DOCSIS 3.1 compliant which means that this modem will support 10Gbps downstream and 1Gbps upstream speeds. Rogers is in the process of rolling this out to facilitate faster speeds on its network.
- It supports IPv6 which Rogers along with a lot of other ISPs are moving towards to support the insane amount of devices and “things” that are now on the Intenet.
And judging from the fact that they e-mailed me and gave me a deadline to swap my modem, Rogers clearly wants to get their older modem/routers out of circulation quickly so that they can move forward with their network upgrades.
Now I was able to plug in the modem/router, get it online, and put it brige mode, all without having to call Rogers. I was impressed by that as my experience with making any sort of change with any of my Rogers services has tended to be a negative experience as it would go sideways in some way. Case in point, my attempt to get Rogers Ignite Gigabit which to be fair, eventually did get sorted out. Another thing that I was impressed with was the speed. This is the speed that I got with my old modem/router via Ethernet at the router:
That’s pretty good. Here’s what I am getting now from the new modem/router:
Now that’s a huge increase in my downstream speed. One other thing that was interesting to see is that I am also seeing these speeds from my router. The previous Rogers router/modem would give up about 50 Mbps to my router. This one is giving up nothing. Proof positive that this is a better performing router/modem. I hope to get better results when DOCSIS 3.1 gets rolled out. The word on the streets is that it will happen sometime in February 2017.
If you have Rogers Ignite 100, 250, or Gigabit, Rogers should reaching out to you via e-mail to get you to swap your modem/router. Thus if you get one of these e-mails, you should run with your old modem/router to your nearest Rogers store to swap it out. If you don’t get an e-mail from Rogers, try taking your Rogers modem/router into one of their stores to see if you can get it swapped. You will thank me for doing so.
UPDATE: For some reason, the wrong version of this story was posted from my content management system. The proper version is now online.