The thing took about 30mins to provision itself.
I'm pretty happy with the speeds. I can get very close to 100mbit from Wellington and Christchurch Telstraclear speedtest servers, the Auckland one for me was only about 50mbit. I tested a large file transfer from Europe and was able to get 75mbit by opening up lots of concurrent sessions, (each session is limited to 200kB/s)
Like the old Motorola SB5101, the Cisco DPC3008 has a web page where you can see the signal strength and some other things at: 192.168.100.1