To start off with, I am moving to a new house. The internet that I have now is really terrible with my down speed at 5mb and my up speed at .3mb. (ATT&T and their copper lines can go fruit themselves. :P ) The only decent speeds that we could get at the new house is from Comcast. (30mb down and 5mb up.) We got a decent deal with Comcast; however, I am concerned about something.
I wasn't there when my family was talking to the Comcast guy who is going to set up the cable at the new house. I was told that we were asked to rent a modem? I have no idea what that means since I thought that a modem was something that was required to connect to the internet and you couldn't "rent" a modem. I was wondering if they meant a router instead.
Does someone have cable, and could they explain to me what they meant?
Also, I know that Comcast isn't a great ISP. However, I live in an area where ISPs are very limited.
They lease the modem to you. Contrary to what you may have been told, Comcast is an Internet through Cable provider, which means it goes over coaxial cable to their switchbox and then over their Cable TV line. Since home routers generally do not connect through Coaxial (they're most often only Cat5e/Ethernet/WiFi compliant), you need a modem to translate the Coaxial signal into a Cat5e/Ethernet signal. That said, some "Gateways" are both Cable Modems and Routers, but not from Comcast (at least in my area). So the modem is needed to modulate the signal from Ethernet to Coaxial so you can talk to the Comcast network.
Ok, short answer time: Comcast is loaning you a cable modem in a lease along with your line/connection. You can buy your own modem and provide that (I think it gets you a 5$ discount on your monthly bill since you're not leasing the device) but generally people don't buy their own modems since the provider leases them one.