I've seen a couple of people here and elsewhere mentioning being able to activate unsupported modems on business-class. I decided to try it myself a couple of days ago.
My dad has a Zoom 5341J and he was out of town for a few days, so I figured I would borrow it and see if it would work. I plugged it in, it synced right up and went to the walled garden page. I punched in my phone number and account number, it then took me to a page showing the modem model/MAC address, which looked correct.
I hit the button to start the activation, and a minute or so later, it came back saying it was unable to activate. It gave me a phone number for automated activations (855-652-3446). I called that and it had the same result. I hung up before it transferred me to someone as I knew that would be a wasted effort.
It had also said to try waiting a bit and doing the walled garden activation again. This is where things got interesting. I reset the modem and tried it again. Instead of saying activation failed, it brought me to a page asking what tier of XFINITY service I wanted to use: Wideband Blast or Wideband Ultra. It said Blast was up to 50 Mbps, and Ultra up to 30 (unfortunately, I neglected to screenshot it). I figured, what the hell, I'll pick Ultra; to minimize any billing discrepancies in case it tried to lump residential service on my account as well, and to see if it was really trying to offer me 22/5.
It chewed away for a couple of minutes, updated the modem's firmware (that was the other big reason why I went through this ordeal), and attached the modem to my account. I did a speedtest, and sure enough, it was 22/5. I went into the modem's logs and right there in plain sight was the config file: d11_m_5341j_ultra_c01.cm.
After the test, I unhooked the modem and connected my SB6121 back up. Everything went back to normal, 27/7 business service. I logged into my account on the Comcast site, and it shows both modems. I'll have to see how I can get the Zoom purged without drawing too much attention to my actions :p.
tl;dr - Using unsupported modems on business seems like yet another YMMV topic with Comcast.
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KI6RIT
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