The long and short of this article: It’s about buggy internet connections caused by poor communication between DSL modems and (wireless) routers; specifically, the Actiontec GT701 and Apple’s AirPort. If you are having internet problems and you have a DSL modem and a router, then you should read this article. I go into a lot of unnecessary explanation; if you’d rather skip the boring details, this link will take you right to the heart of the instructions. Finally, even if you don’t have an Actiontec or an AirPort, you can probably extract and interpolate what you need from these instructions.
I have an Actiontec DSL modem and an AirPort Express. They do not communicate well. You see, by default, Actiontecs go into what I like to call “Granny Mode.” That is, they expect to be set up with minimal effort and be plugged right into the back of grandma’s old beige clunker. They “protect” that old PC by letting in few incoming communications. They both filter out the internet portion of the phone line and communicate with the ISP to retrieve internet, so that it can easily be passed on to grandma’s compy.
So what happens when you connect not a PC but an AirPort to the modem? Well, the AirPort obediently sees an already-purified, DHCP-ready, fuzzy-warm IP/packet connection. So that’s what it transmits. You see, the AirPort is translating every local packet that comes to it from its own IP to the Actiontec’s IP. And the Actiontec is translating each of those packets to the final destination IP. And in all those conversions, the connection slows down, packets get lost, and the modem gets confused and resets the connection with the ISP, which kills all active communications.
Only recently have I discovered a solution, but no one has spelled it out adequately. If you have an Actiontec, and you have an AirPort, you should do this. What it comes right down to is that your AirPort can do a fine job speaking directly with your ISP; the modem is not needed for that task at all. And that means there are fewer translations, fewer slowdowns, and therefore greater reliability. “So,” you ask yourself, “I can just toss my old modem?” Not so fast. Your AirPort is not quite that great; you can’t just plug a phone line into the ethernet port. There are two functions that must happen before you have internet (three, if you’re doing wireless): Demodulate the DSL connection coming in (the -dem part of modem), communicate with the ISP (the internet part), and distribute that internet to computers.
Your modem wants to do all three, but your AirPort is better at doing the last two. So, we simply transfer that power. By putting the Actiontec in what’s called “Modem Transparent Bridging,” you get the demodulating function of the modem, and simply pass on all communications, no-questions-asked, to the AirPort. Let’s get started.
Open up Safari/Firefox/Chrome/YourFavouriteBrowser, and go to 192.168.0.1 . This brings you to the Actiontec setup page. (If that didn’t work, you might need to plug in your computer directly to the modem with an ethernet cable.) Go to advanced setup and, if necessary, select WAN IP Address. Click continue. Select the radio button for RFC 1483 Transparent Bridging; all other settings will grey out, because they will all be set in the AirPort. Click apply. Congratulations, you have just passed the torch on to the AirPort. Now we need to get it ready to accept that torch.
Open up AirPort Utility (inside /Applications/Utilities). Find your AirPort and click Manual Setup, providing your password if necessary. Select the Internet tab at the top of the window. Under Internet Connection, select Connect using PPPoE. Enter your DSL account name and password. Under the PPPoE tab, make sure the connection is Always On. At the bottom of the window, click Update.
Now try your internet connection. It should work a little faster. Don’t see anything, you say? I ran into this problem: my AirPort could not find my ISP’s domain name server (when I typed in gmail.com, for instance, the AirPort could not figure out where on the internet that was). My solution was to use OpenDNS, which works at least as well as anything else I’ve used. Go back into AirPort Utility and select the Internet and PPPoE tabs again. Under DNS Servers, enter 208.67.222.222 in the first box and 208.67.220.220 in the second. Click Update again, and restart your modem for good measure. Your internet connections should now be in tip-top shape.
Beneficial Side Effects (BSEs): It is easier to host and share from your computer. Using Network Address Translation (NAT) in your AirPort, you can direct AFP filesharing connections to your computer, allowing you to access your files from abroad. I won’t go into those gritty details here; just know that Google is your friend and that you need to forward to port 548 on your computer.
Taldar 
And yes, Qwest allows PPPoE in all areas now.
Why not just put the Airport into “bridge” mode (connection sharing is “off.”) There is a drop-down selection for that on the Internet Connection tab of the Internet icon. I do the above and it works fine with my Time Capsule and ActionTec, both purchased in Dec. of 2010.
Well, Al, I guess that’s a somewhat similar setup, except for one key point: the AirPort is more capable than the modem and (in my experience, anyway) is more stable. Moreover, the AirPort is specifically a networking device, where the modem is an internet connection device, the PPPoE being a feature common to both. So, since “bridging” essentially disables PPPoE and some networking features, I prefer to do that to the modem, and leave the AirPort in full control of the networking.
There seems to be two schools of thought on the subject. One says that the device “nearest” the ISP should do the PPPoE and the DHCP. That device of course would be the modem, if capable (which the ActionTec is.) The other opinion is that modems are not as “powerful” nor as efficient as some routers and that it is best to have them do as little as possible by putting them in “bridge mode” and off-loading the authentication and DHCP (and maybe DNS?) to the router.
My guess is that the ActionTec engineers rather expected their device to perform all the functions because they made putting it in “bridge” mode rather obscure and made zero mention of it in the manual.
I’ve had no problems with ATT DSL with the ActionTec configured as a “gateway” and having my Time Capsule in “bridge” mode. I suppose I could change the configuration to see if I get better performance… but since authentication PPPoE and DMHC are not done all that often (from what I understand) that there is no reason to expect faster throughput by having the router do them instead of the modem. Of course, perhaps there is more to this technology than I understand and that I’m not seeing the whole picture.
In the “old days” when DSL was starting to get traction the modems were fairly “dumb” devices and we were told it was best to put them in bridge and let the router do everything. From what I read these days, that view has been reversed.
I suppose you’re right about the throughput issue: there is no reason to expect either device to work faster over the other. However, (and this may be peculiar to my situation), I live in an area with an unusual amount of tel. line noise; before I wrote this article, I had used two different ActionTecs. They would both drop the connection on average five times per day, and would fail to reconnect 80% of the time.
Now that I use the AirPort to do the PPPoE, the connection drops only about once per day, and almost always reconnects within thirty seconds without any intervention. Only once every three weeks or so do I have to perform a restart—yet it’s always the Modem that screwed up so dramatically (as confirmed by process-of-elimination). So perhaps this is just the problem of a buggy device, and I hope and suspect that this has been fixed by ActionTec since I purchased my Modem.
Warning: the following paragraph is colored by immense personal opinion. I have seen in the configuration screens of both devices that similar features are provided, in terms of NAT or other such fanciness, but the AirPort Setup Utility is far smoother and easier to navigate, simply by the fact that it uses native Cocoa interface controls, rather than QuirksMode HTML. Plus, since the AirPort is designed by Apple, it has certain automatic networking features that operate smoothly with my computers, such as specific ARD forwarding, which would be possible with other routers, but more difficult to set up. In any case, I’ve worked with two devices that live in my house: one seems to be built well, and the other doesn’t. Perhaps it’s just my unfair prejudice, but I entrust my network to the former.
Fortunately I’m in an area with excellent ATT DSL… probably because I’m only 300 yards from the switch building.
I’ve been happy with the ActionTec… it came highly rated by user-reviews on the usual boards… Amazon, BestBuy, etc.
Maybe you can answer this. There is an ActionTec firmware update that came out a few months ago for the GT701D. I didn’t know about it until yesterday when I was poking around the ActionTec site looking for info on “bridge.” Anyway, they say one has to be connected via ethernet to do the update. I’m connect to the Time Cap router via ethernet cable (not wireless) so I wonder if I can still do the firmware update? I don’t see why not. Do you know? I don’t want to crawl around the floor unplugging stuff if I can avoid it. (I’m 128 years old… or so my joints often feel like!!!)
That would depend upon how the update is to be installed. If you need to download something to your computer first, then I wouldn’t mess around trying to get it to work through the AirPort, even if you’re wired in. (To my knowledge, the AirPort treats both wired and wireless clients the same.) On the other hand, if it works by having the modem download and cache the update on its own, where you just have to go to the configuration page to “hit the button” to make it install itself, I see no reason why you couldn’t do that over your existing connection.
You first download an .img file and then use the web interface to find the file and install it. I’ll let you if it works while connected to the router. I believe it will.
hmmm… i’ve been using the GT701D with an Airport Extreme for a couple of years, with the GT set to bridge and the AE doing all the heavy lifting. with the dumbing down of the Airport Utility software (yes I know about 5.6) i am considering reversing my setup now. The GT GUI may be a little clunky but I really do like having access to all the knobs, you know. There’s one other benefit to the GT smart | AE dumb setup… access to the WAN side sys logs.