Switched from FIOS Actiontec router to my own router and wow, what a difference!

[nerp]

Anyone on the fence about this, don't wait any longer. My LAN speeds are so much better thanks to having gigabit on the router. I finally have 802.11 AC and dual band. No issues at all with everyone in the family streaming and doing stuff. The Actiontec was choking hard lately with so many devices in our home and so much going on--much more than it was designed for.

I have coax coming from the box outside into my house so I had to keep using the Actiontec to convert the coax into usable ethernet/internet. All you have to do is turn the Actiontec into a MoCA bridge. Very simple. Just turn off DHCP, turn off wifi on the Actiontec then tell it to NOT get an IP, release its IP, plug the new router into one of the LAN ports of the Actiontec and your router gets an IP address from Verizon and you're good to go. Now the Actiontec really is just a dumb box converting coax into ethernet and giving me an internet connection. And it's enough to give me my full 100mbit from Verizon. And now my new TP-Link router is handling all NAT, network routing, wifi, etc. Performance is amazing and was very easy to accomplish.

I've seen many posts from folks complaining about wifi/network issues and have older or ISP supplied routers. Consider upgrading.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I believe that you may be mistaken about a few things. Then again, I could be wrong too.

I don't believe that you are simply running the ActionTec as a MoCa bridge. The reason being is that a MoCa bridge is LAN-to-LAN. But if you have Coax coming from your ONT rather than ethernet, then you have MoCa WAN. Which is different than MoCa LAN.

I have a similar setup, but I wouldn't call it a MoCa bridge.

I have Moca WAN over coax from my ONT to my Rev. I ActionTec, and then I have a secondary router connected with its WAN to an ActionTec LAN. The secondary router is on a different subnet, and the ActionTec is set up to forward all incoming unsolicited packets to the secondary router.

 

[nerp]

Evertything I read said it's a MoCA bridge now. It's only function now is to take the coax signal and turn it into LAN. It does no DHCP or wifi. It doesn't even have an IP address. All the lights are off/red. There are guides on how to do it and they all say how to turn your Actiontec into a MoCA bridge. It's either that or buy a MoCA bridge to do this. The key to this setup is having your router, not the Actiontec, handle DHCP and everything else. The Actiontec does no routing. It's not even part of my network as its in front of the router.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I guess I don't get that. Wouldn't you be bridging LAN and WAN together then? MoCa WAN is a different range of frequencies than MoCa LAN. The signal from the ONT is MoCa WAN. The signal used by the set-top boxes is MoCa LAN. I've heard that the ActionTec can be used as a MoCa bridge, but I understood that as LAN-to-LAN. It doesn't make sense that you would be directly bridging WAN to LAN, without a routing / NAT functionality in-between.

 

[rh71]

Good to know but in my case I'd need to buy yet another router.

- I have a TP Link C7 AC1750 set up at the other side (more like the middle) of my house as an access point (CAT5 connected to Actiontec). The Actiontec is at the end room where the coax comes into the house so the wifi sucked beyond half-way through the house (especially upstairs too).
- 5GHz within my house seemed unreliable, just upstairs and around 1 corner it was having trouble. Dual band for me seems more like a gimmick in a home setting. I turned it off altogether.
- Getting fine speeds even with streaming LAN stuff throughout the house.

 

[nerp]

OK, so so I have coax coming from the ONT into the house. So then it goes to the actiontec. The actiontec config is set to bridge the coax broadband to ethernet, which gives me raw internet over the 4-ports on the actiontec. I connect my router to one of the actiontec ports. The actiontec is really just a passthrough at this point and is not doing any network management, just carrying the internet along. My new router then gets the signal from the actiontec and is the device that FIOS assigns my external IP. Then the router handles my entire network, including DHCP, wifi and everything else. Everything for the network is tapped into the router.

Oh, meant to say, I plug from one of the actiontec's LAN ports into the router's blue "internet" port.

Since the actiontec's role now is dumbed down and it does no network management tasks, I believe it really is serving just one purpose and that's to give me a signal over ethernet from Verizon by bridging the coax connection. It really is operating just like a cable modem or DSL modem that simply lights green when it's synced up with the ISP and gives you an ethernet jack to connect to a router. In my case, the key thing is that the new router (T-P Link Archer C7) is communicating with verizon to get assign my external IP. And if you poke around my network, the actiontec is invisible. It's not really a device on my network as it's just passing the signal along.

*I can still log in to it, but I have to connect directly to it with a computer via LAN and manually browse to its IP that can't be reached on my actual home LAN.

You can buy a MoCA bridge to do this exact thing if you don't have an actiontec router supplied by Verizon when you get their residential service.

Back in the day, the actiontec was pretty impressive but it really chokes on hardcore use with a family pegging it with a variety of devices. I routinely have multiple HD feeds and streams flying all around.

 

[nerp]

Oh, meant to mention, the method I used kills functionality for set top boxes. I don't use any set top boxes so it's a non-issue for me but people with TVs connected to STBs and those with Verizon DVR stuff and who do VOD will lose all that. This is a method used primarily by people who have cut the cord and want a better router than the actiontec and haven't gotten around to Verizon coming to re-wire the ONT from coax to ethernet.

In my case, I like keeping the coax since it gives me channels over ClearQAM and I have a TV tuner in one of my windows 10 machines. I watch the news while I work etc. Plus the difference in speed between ethernet and coax from the ONT seems negligible and coax isn't being saturated even at 100mbit. Having my router be gigabit now instead of 100mbit is a huge, noticeable difference already.

RE: dual band: interesting observation. I'm finding that 5ghz is incredible when i'm close to the router but yeah, if I'm in the yard, my iPhone starts to get spotty. Having two connections is kinda a PITA when its in your house and there doesn't seem to be an intelligent way for devices to switch back and forth seamlessly. I set some devices to use the 2.4 and others to 5 depending on stuff. My kid's kindle fire doesn't need to be on 5ghz, for example.

Overall a great router though and my overall network experience is MUCH snappier. It's almost like the actiontec was clogged up with mud or had restricted arteries or something.

 

[mxnerd]

Think this is how nerp configured it?

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Simpl...kingAnFIOsActionTecMI424WRANetworkBridge.aspx

 

[rh71]

^ haha this is so true

WARNING TO THOSE GEEKS IN RELATIONSHIPS: You'll work on this for a whole weekend, like I did, and when you get it all working it'll be totally awesome and you'll love everything about yourself. Then, you'll go and regale our gender-non-specific-non-geek partner with tales of your dramatic success and they will not care. In fact, ideally, they won't even know that you did anything, but perhaps they'll be able to watch House of Cards in the tub when previously they couldn't. Regardless, be prepared for the deafening silence of your non-technical partner's profound apathy.

I was able to get fast wifi over to my kids' rooms, but alas they were only 7 and don't much care yet. I would've been their hero had they been teenagers and are bedroom reclused.

My wife just knows I did something with a wifi router and drilled a hole in the wall. Even though she's in IT, she couldn't care less.

 

[nerp]

Think this is how nerp configured it?

http://www.hanselman.com/blog/Simpl...kingAnFIOsActionTecMI424WRANetworkBridge.aspx

That's pretty much it. My settings looked slightly different (newer firmware on mine I guess). I didn't have to change as many settings, either. I simply turned off DHCP, turned off wifi, released the IP, set it to get NO IP, confirmed that the LAN and broadband coax were bridged (already were) and rebooted it. Then I connected the T-P link, rebooted that and boom. Done.

 

[nerp]

^ haha this is so true



I was able to get fast wifi over to my kids' rooms, but alas they were only 7 and don't much care yet. I would've been their hero had they been teenagers and are bedroom reclused.

My wife just knows I did something with a wifi router and drilled a hole in the wall. Even though she's in IT, she couldn't care less.

It I so true. I keep asking my wife and sending her texts "have you noticed a difference?" etc.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I did the same with my Bell FibreOP. Makes a HUGE difference for how fast the TV menus are, you would not think that would be dictated by the router... but somehow it makes a big difference. It's not as laggy. I replaced mine with an Asus in which someone wrote a custom firmware for that works with the fibre service. You can't just use any router. The service uses different vlans for internet, phone and TV, but the TV also uses some kind of layer 2 QoS which throws off everything if you try to simply use a managed switch/router and the vlans. My biggest with having to use the ISP provided router was having double NAT, since I still wanted to use my pfsense router. With the Asus router and custom firmware, it allows you to make it pass through. So my Pfsense firewall gets the IP directly, and the TVs plug into the other ports of the Asus. Downside with this config is now that I set the router as pass through, it's no longer a layer 3 device, it's a layer 2 device. No idea how I would go about getting to the config page if I had to.

Before I learned about this router and the custom firmware, I had gotten very close to getting it to work with pfsense/managed switch. What I did is set the WAN port of the pfsense box as a trunk port, then plugged directly into the ONT. I then setup WAN interfaces for each VLAN (32 and 33 or something, I forget). The internet one worked great, but the TV one was sporadic. I would get about 10 seconds of TV, then it would cut out. One of these days I still want to revisit that, as it would be nice to take one piece of equipment out of the equation. But it works fine with that Asus router so have not really been bothered to play with it.

 

[kevnich2]

Just to clear up something from those reading this - if you have FIOS and use coax from the ONT, you HAVE to use one of the verizon provided router's for connection OR have Verizon switch your connection to ethernet. The OP is still using the Verizon provided actiontec router for his internet.

This should work just fine as long as you enable DMZ on the actiontec and put in the second router's IP address into the dmz of the actiontec. Things like voip don't work well, or at all with double NAT.

 

[kevnich2]

OP - if you're NOT using the verizon stb boxes, is there a reason you don't want to run a cat5 network cable from the ONT to your router and just completely remove the actiontec? Depending on your speed package, it may improve your connection even more.

 

[nerp]

OP - if you're NOT using the verizon stb boxes, is there a reason you don't want to run a cat5 network cable from the ONT to your router and just completely remove the actiontec? Depending on your speed package, it may improve your connection even more.

Mainly I don't want to mess with the wiring from the box into the house at this time. We have some planned renovations coming in the future and that would be the time since we'll be able to add some cat6 in some areas where it currently doesn't exist. This is a bit of a stopgap measure for the time being but it works well and the performance difference isn't massive, if I understand right.