Airport Extreme / Motorola Surfboard 6141 Disconnecting

LaPastenague wrote:

For cost and convenience a crossover is a good solution.

Agree. I'll keep monitoring on for a while to get a better trend and after that I probably will get a different modem to compare. Even if the drops are few now it is still an issue with voip calls and vpn dropping obviously and the old setup ran months without a single drop so not quite there yet.

Meanwhile Arris/Motorola support won't escalate to engineering to have this looked into and Apple usually doesn't respond to bug reports.

Reset statistics and have been monitoring for a full 24h hours with the cross over cable now and there have been 3 outages. I'd consider those related to the cable network and not to my local equipment.

So to summarize the packet drops with cross-over are very few while with a regular wire between AP extreme and SB6141 were once every 48 minutes when averaged out.

I have been commenting on a thread with the same issue over here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/5140686?start=0&tstart=0. I had myself convinced that my problem was a faulty AirPort Time Capsule 3TB that I received several weeks ago. Now I'm not so sure it's not my older Motorla SB6120, which is very similar I believe to the 6141. FWIW I am also using Comcast Xfinity in Seattle WA where we recently converted over (apparently) to full IPv6.

I'm sure the helpful Geniuses at the Apple store will swap out my TC, but I might check out the prices on a new Netgear modem that is compatible with Comcast and try that first.

Whatever it is that is keeping the TC and modems from playing nicely, I sure hope they figure out a solution quickly. I've read hundreds of posts both here and on the Comcast Forums with people struggling with the same exact problem....

Pete- I swapped the Motorola for a Zoom modem and all is fine since then. Can't reproduce the issue anymore. Not every Motorola modem seems affected. I had a different one before and it worked find. Probably a hardware/software revision issue.

I just ordered a Cisco DPC-3008 from Amazon today. I'm keeping my fingers crossed! Thank you!

I'm happy to report my connection problem has been solved. Time Warner technician found that the problem was the squirrels chewing on the outside cable and there was corrosion. After a new cable replacement, my connection with Netgear modem CMD31T and AirPort Extreme has been working perfectly.

I just posted in the other thread that my new Linksys DPC-3008-CC modem has solved my problem. I am thinking that the TC has some aversion to noise or power spikes or something else coming from the older Motorola modems, particularly in the presence of IPv6 signals. Whatever this is, it makes the TC think (and report) that the internet connection just disappears for awhile at regular intervals.

Clearly a firmware fix is needed to make it more flexible to these irritating issues with the expected signal. However I didn't want to wait and (for now!) it appears that the money I spent on this new "Comcast Certified" modem has been worth it. I have been able to connect the TC directly to the modem (as it should be) and it's now operating as wireless network antenna, router, DHCP/NAT server, and Time Machine. Hooray!

Anybody want to buy a used SB6120 cheap??? 🙂

Had very similar problems, worked on this for multiple hours, even had a representative from Time Warner cable in NC come to the house. After he replaced a few rusty connectors outside the house and checked the signal strengths, he came to the conclusion that "the router was bad" and "those things look expensive" (things being a $99 Airport Express circa 2012).

Using a Motorola Surfboard and an Airport Express.

Again, I tried the numerous solutions and waiting periods as well as the dance of "plug this in, in this order".

Then I stumbled upon a post refering to this as a DNS problem. As the saying goes, 'it's always the last place you look', I moved into the AE's DNS settings, changed them to OpenDNS's Family Shield (we've used these in the past, I'm sure Google DNS or similar would work as well), applied the settings to the AE (AE rebooted), and viola, back up and running.

I did notice that it took a minute or two for our connection speeds to get back up to normal. Ran a speed test or two and after a few minutes our speeds were back to where they should be.

I thought I'd jink myself and I did... after I guess about a week the same old symptoms again - dropping connectivity about every five minutes. The Airport utility showing the globe with an orange dot and thinking it's disconnected. The Airport Extreme 3TB TC itself thinks it's fine. At the same time my modem thinks it's fine. And the wireless keeps transmitting and receiving, just without a connection.

I'm back now with my old $40 D-Link router talking to the modem and the TC in Bridge mode on one of the LAN slots. Something from Comcast (and possibly others) - perhaps something weird with IPv6 - or maybe dealing with a noisy cable line- is creating a disconnect between the cable modem output and the TC input. Somewhere along the line the Internet connection is getting hammered. This does not seem to be modem brand related as my brand new Cisco modem is doing the same thing - after about a week doing great.

Could there be something that gets screwed up the first time the DHCP leases expire and the TC tries to negotiate a new one? Perhaps the D-Link is more forgiving with the language the TC uses.

I know you Apple folks read these posts. Please let me know, either privately or in this thread if you are working on anything like this. My only other option is to return the TC, which I may do if it starts being flaky in Bridge mode.

Best of luck to all,

-pete

I was having very similar problems to what has been described in this post. I was tearing my hair out for a couple weeks trying to figure it out. Turns out my upload link was saturated by my online backup service (BackBlaze). Apparently, when your upload bandwidth is maxed out, it causes all sorts of issues because devices on your network are no longer able to send acknowlegment packets to the server... this basically looks like the internet has been disconnected. My fix was to set an upload cap on BackBlaze.

I have had similar problems to others here lately:

Apple Extreme 5th generation 2012 (brick not tower)

Comcast Xfinity

Motorola SB6141 router

Several Macs and an Apple TV on the home network

Worked well until a week ago when I started having all the drop out issues people have noted here. I did the following that I didn't previously know --

1) Enable IPv6

2) Make double darned sure the DNS servers for both IPv4 and v6 were explicitly stated (they were gone at one point!)

3) provide a name for the 5GHz channel.

So far so good for today; we'll see. This thread and another one ("New Airport Time Capsule Dropping Wifi/Internet with 7.7.1") have been very helpful as I've been trouble-shooting, and I thank you all.

Steve White

I definitely think this is a Mavericks issue. My iMac running Mavericks is the ONLY system in the house that drops the network randomly while all other systems never lose the network. No idea how to resolve this, but here is the workaround I'm posting:

I've had the 'network drop' issue with my Airport Extreme for the last 2 months. It reconnects when I pull the ethernet cable and plug it back in. I've tried downgrading the AE firmware, resetting to factory, etc. Nothing worked. I finally threw in the towel and created a script that monitors my network connectivity and restarts my interface if it senses it has dropped:

##############

#!/bin/ksh

while true

do

yup=`ping -c1 -t2 www.google.com|grep from`

if [[ -n $yup ]]

then echo "Internet is connected!"

else

ifconfig en0 down; ifconfig en0 up

echo "Down at `date +%m%d%Y%H%M%S`">>./dropped.out

fi

sleep 5

clear

done

###############

I know its a workaround, but its saving me the headache of constantly pulling my cable and putting it back in!

Good luck!

-Mike Gray

I have (had) an Airport Extreme with Time Warner Cable and a Motorola SB 6141 Cable Modem. It was rock solid and fast for about 6 months. Then, I started getting an extremely intermittent outage. The modem would stay connected to the network on both sides (Time Warner's and to the Airport Extreme". All the lights on the modem were fine. The light on the Airport Extreme was green. No problems were ever logged on the modem. But, the internet connection would drop. The only indication was Airport Utility would show the Airport Extreme as green while the Internet indicator was yellow. adn

I'll spare you the details, but two months later and two Airport Extremes (graciously replaced by Apple) and after changing out the ethernet cable, trying every possible configuration setting on the Airport Extreme and several support calls with Motorola (Arris), Apple and Time Warner, I finally went out and bought a Zoom cable modem. Problem solved.

This is NOT the DNS problems some people have had (timeouts). The internet did not slow. It was gone. My connection was either on or off. Speed tests were perfect, when they ran. The modem signal levels were perfect. Time Warner came to the house and checked all of the connectors. So, I don't know if my modem went bad or it's just an incompatibility and since Motorola refused to replace it under warranty, I guess I'll never know and I'll be a Zoom customer.

I have had similar issue to what people have posted. All attempts to resolve it have had limited success. Perhaps the attempts were in vain with any perceived success only being due to a restart. I give up. Which Zoom modem did you get Brian? I'll throw another fistful of cash at this one more time.

pvaughan, I'd try another modem. I hated to spend another $75.00 but when I began to think about the time I spent troubleshooting this, I decided to cut my losses. The Airport Extreme had been replaced twice, the ethernet cable had been replaced. I figured changing out the modem had to do it. I had several times when I thought this was fixed. It would go for days, up to a week at a time with no apparent problems, then it would start happening again.

I went with the Zoom 5341. It's actually cheaper than the Motorola. Two separate people at Microcenter recommended it saying they had had no returns on this one. It's been about 9 days now and no problems other than a planned outage (that Time Warner didn't tell me about) yesterday morning. The really weird thing is the planned outage resulted in the exact same problem I was having before except one of the lights on the modem actually changed from solid green to solid blue. I could even by-pass the Airport Extreme and connect to the internet during the outage.

Today, it's back to normal, except that light is still solid blue, so now I'm not sure if it should be solid blue or solid green. I wonder if Time Warner actually fixed something that was causing my other modem to have problems. I'm almost tempted to try the Motorola again since it's sitting here under my desk, but I think I'll leave well enough alone.

If I experience the problem, I'll update this thread. Otherwise, assume the Zoom modem solved it.