John Yerhot

I have DSL service from Qwest.  It is ok.  Beats the competition. The one thing I HATE is the modem I got from them, an Actiontec GT-701WG.

The problem?  It was darn near impossible to make it be JUST a modem, not act as a router/gateway, not act as a NAT, no frickin Actioncrap firewall, just give me the WAN Ip address!

Nearley, but not impossible.  Here is how.

The trick is to set the modem to transparent bridged mode (I think it was labeled as RFC 1483 Bridged). You should be able to find it somewhere in the advanced setup section.  The username and password needed below are also found on the same page.

Then you take your handy dandy router (mine is running DD WRT v.24, may not work with standard firmware) and change the WAN setup like this:

1. Connection type = PPPoE (Even though Qwest says they only support PPPoA
2. Username = your username… our was parts of our last name followed by some numbers.
3. Password = corresponding password
4. PPP Compression = On.  At least I have it on.

Everything else in that option group set to off.  While your at it, go to DNS and grab OpenDNS’s DNS server’s ips and throw them in there.

Now what the heck did this do?  Well, now your router’s WAN IP will be the Ip assigned by Qwest.  Before it was being assigned an IP by the Actiontec modem, probably 192.168.1.1XX, cause it was acting as a router, which sucks.  Now, the router is the gateway and, if you’re running DD WRT or some other thirdparty firmware, a much better gateway than the Actiontec was.

I honestly have experianced my better preformance from my DSL and used to have to powercycle the modem at least weekly.  Its been going for a month like this and hasn’t been power cycled.  Not to mention all the much better features DD WRT offers.  Sweet.