Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The problem with buying refurbished is that someone else owned it before you did. This modem worked just fine; there was nothing wrong with it. I could not use it, however. I bought it for my Comcast business internet account in Washington, but the person who originally owned it still has it tied to his active Comcast account in Florida. He obviously is using another modem now, but because he didn't tell Comcast when he passed this modem on, they still have its MAC address (which is baked into the hardware and unchangeable) assigned to him and were unable to reassign it to me. I spent a decent amount of time with Comcast's various departments trying to figure out a way to use it, but no dice. It was essentially a nice refurbished brick. I knew that there was a risk buying refurbished, but figured that it would just not work or something. I'm currently going through the (pretty painless) return process with Amazon, but will not buy another refurbished item in the future unless I know there's no way to connect the item back to its previous owner. Caveat emptor, I guess.