Airport Extreme and Cox Internet IPv6 Problem
This is a notification to others as well as a question:
I have Cox Cable High Speed Internet at several locations using an Airport Extreme 3GB connected as a router to the Cox cable modem.
For more than a week we would regularly find in the morning that the outside connection to the internet DNS servers were lost. We called Cox several times, and they performed the usual reset of router and modem and things seem to work for a while. But the next day gone again.
They came out and replaced the hookups, I I had to buy a new cable modem and replaced a digital switch. Each time things seemed to work for a while.
I thought about replacing the Airport Extreme (as I read others had done in a similar situation to no avail).
After much frustration, I started to search for Airport Extreme and DNS and found similar tales.
After several unproductive calls with Cox Internet first tier support, I finally reached a tier who acknowledged that Cox was rolling out IPv6 and was having a problem with Airport Extreme Routers. They said Apple was working on it and gave me a number to call at apple router support. Unfortunalely the number they gave was no longer valid.
I persisted and eventually got to Apple support and indeed they knew of the problem and said Cox was working on it.. But there was a temporary fix - and that was to turn off iPv6 on the airport extreme (more precisely (internet > Internet Options > Configure Ipv6 : Link-Local Only).
For now this seemed to stop the overnight drop that seems to happen between 12:00 AM and 2:00 AM. From experience I dont think its really an IPV6 compaibility issue, but how the router responds to some sort of reset signal/test signal that the service does in the early morning.
So the question is - does anybody know for sure whats going on or who is really working on this. From my perspective both camps think its the other's problem. BTW - Ive read about others with Non Apple routers chasing something similar.