Got to give some credit to jtombes for calling this in June when I speculated on who would buy Motorola Home, and he put Arris out there as a possibility... and I sorta shot it down based on Arris's track record of not paying top dollar when it came to M&A. Nice call, dude. JB

The expected range was pretty big... $1.5B to $2.5B and it was looking like it would fall on the lower end of that range...but it was on the high end.  Arris, which typically has not paid top dollar for its aquisitions, had apparently gone all out on this. one, and the deal, if it gets done, finally gets Arris beyond the shadows of Cisco and Motorola/GI and could create a formidable foil to Cisco.  From what I was told, having Arris win the bidding is the outcome that the big MSOs (notably Comcast) wanted. JB

So, Google got its asking price after all, and then some. First impression is that Arris, Pace and others must have wrangled it out.  Nice situation for Google, if that's the case.