Airport Extreme and Verizon FIOS Router?

Good evening,

I thought I might chime in with my own experience of the past few days. I too have a Verizon FIOS router - the Actiontec g-band modem/wireless router. Here's my experience...

When I set up the AirPort Extreme (APE) router I used a Cat6 cable out of a LAN port on the back of the Actiontec modem to the WAN port on the APE. I used an old MacBook and the AirPort Utility to access the device. I observed that it automatically set up the device in 'bridge' mode. I then had two wireless networks operating. I set up the WPA2 password and changed the SSID of the APE and then saved the settings. I then went into the Actiontec modem and turned off the wireless network.

It is as simple as that.

Now I had played with it at some point to test its DHCP capabilities and so I turned on DHCP & NAT and wound up with a double NAT (no settings changed on the Actiontec). As a result I received an error message from the APE indicating a double NAT. Speeds were not effected across any of my wireless devices. Nevertheless I reverted back to bridge mode as there was no reason to disallow the Actiontec modem from serving that purpose.

I did notice that if you attempt to make the Actiontec modem a 'bridge' and make the APE assign IP addresses you may inadvertantly kill the internet connection to your home. I did this and found that no IP address was being assigned to my home and so the internet was down and so was Verizon services on the FIOS TV - i.e., OnDemand - the coax system wouldn't connect. The fix was to call Verizon and the technician reassigned a new IP address to the modem. The process for making the Actiontec modem a bridge are a little on the complicated side, I suggest you leave the settings on that modem alone.

Use the APE as a bridge and be happy with the results. There are no ill effects on the speed or connection of devices when APE is in bridge mode.

I am very pleased with my experience thus far with the APE, all devices cable of N band doubled their speed when compared to the G band Actiontec modem. It almost as if all devices are wired into a gigabit lan.

Excellent product. Hope you find this helpful or at least interesting.

Will this give the AE a discrete Private IP address?

One more question, you said in Bridge the AE will no longer be able to perform as a router, do you mean I will not be able to directly connect a device to its ports for direct internet service vs wireless?

For a long time I've been using a linksys router in place of the Verizon provided router which died.

I just got an aiport extreme which I though would be trivial to use in place of the linksys router. However, if I connect the airport to the FIOS feed the airport doesn't connect to the internet. I spent some time on the phone with apple support, and the support guy thought it ought to just work! He proposed "turning the modem on and off" but there is nothing to power cycle.

As a temporary kludge I have the airport running in bridge mode connected to the linksys - but this seems very silly! Does anyone have any suggestions here? The airport is a refurbished model so I guess I'm suspicious it's not working right. However, it does seem to work fine as a bridge.

Thanks!

Whenever, you change physical devices on FIOS you have to get a new lease from verizon. According to verizon, there are 3 ways to do this.

1. Call verizon tech support and have them release/renew the lease

2. Disconnet the device and wait a couple of hours for the lease to renew automatically.

3. Access the control panel on the verizon router and click the 'renew lease' button and then disconnect the router before it picks up a new lease and then connect your new device.

[Tesserax]<<I would recommend that you use the AirPort Utility to configure the AEBSn with a static Private IP address just outside of the Verizon's DHCP server range.>>

Will the ISP still trano/from AEBS, if their IPs are not within the range of IP addresses the ISP specifiied?

My setup will be ISP>Extreme 802.11n > ethernet > 4@Express 802.11n bridges > wifi client computers.

Would it be better to use DHCP at the Extreme and Express base stations or WDS?

Apple server messed up while I was editing my post. Here is the correct one.

My setup will be ISP>Extreme 802.11n > ethernet > 4@Express 802.11n bridges > wifi client computers.

1. Would it be better to use DHCP at the Extreme and Express base stations on a roaming network or WDS?

2. It seems that on the main BS (Extreme) Connection Sharing pop-up we can choose "Share a public IP address" or "Distribute a range of IP addresses". Does the former mean the remote BS (Express in bridge mode) must be set to WDS and the latter mean the remote BS is set to DHCP?

3. Would it be better to designate specific IP addresses for the four remote BS?

Thanks for sharing your kowledge.

This is all well and good if you only have 1 AE and 1 Verizon Router. I have a network with 1 TM, 1 AE and 1 AEx all working in a WDS network (TM as main and the other 2 as remote). I'm guessing if I use Verizon's FORCED network, I'll have to conform to their subnet ranges, etc. This is rediculous that a company forces it's customers into a single groove, just because they didn't think through the possibilities (or more likely just didn't give a crap).

On a side note, the Airport Utility that comes with Lion is the biggest piece of crap. I'm glad they allow the previous version to run on Lion. At least for now.

What a night mare Verizon has created for it's customers that actually have the ability and knowledge to configure their network they way they would like it to be configured.

Here's a question: hopefully somebody can help. Just got Fios installed. Their router is connected to my Airport extreme. Everything is running fine except one thing. I've alway had a USB external drive connected to my Airport and done Time Machine backups wirelessly. Now, since fios, no go. In Airport utility, the drive is there. But, Time Machine can no longer find it. Anyone?