If you get high speed Internet from an Internet Service Provider (ISP), you may be able to purchase your own cable modem and save money. Typically, the cable company provides the cable modem and charges a monthly fee. You can replace it with your own for a one-time cost.
My ISP is Time Warner Cable and for years I leased my cable modem from them. To find out more about my options, I went to the Time Warner Cable (TWC) site. TWC offers different plans, each with higher bandwidth than the last. You can look up cable modems on the TWC site by bandwith and it will tell you what 3rd Party modems are compatible with their equipment. I noted cable modems I was interested in and did a Google search for reviews on them. Once I had settled on one that had good reviews, I ordered it using my Amazon Prime account, which gives me free 2-day shipping.
When it arrived, I opened the package and read the short booklet that came with it. There were only 3 connectors to hook up: the Internet cable connector, the Ethernet cable connector to my wireless router, and the power adaptor. Very simple. The only thing that is not so obvious is that I had to call TWC tech support and give them the MAC address of my cable modem before I could use it. (The MAC address is an absolutely unique ID that is used to “find” the device on the network). Just as your telephone needs an absolutely unique phone number (which, if you think about it, is really its address), a network device needs a unique ID number. The MAC address was on a label on the device and also on a label in the booklet. TWC needed to record the MAC address in my account so that their system could find my device on their network.
At first, I was not connected to the Internet. I rebooted my wireless router. I’m not sure I absolutely I had to do that, but it’s what I did, and 30 seconds later my Internet connection was working.
Please note that my mention of specific companies does not constitute an endorsement of them. I am just describing what I did.