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Internet Connectivity problems with R8000

wa1oui
Aspirant

Internet Connectivity problems with R8000

I've had an R8000 Nighthawk for several months, connected to Comcast. Today, our internet was intermittent this morning, and got worse in the afternoon. Finally mid-afternoon the internet went down completely from the router. I connected a new cable from my cable modem to my iMac and the internet connection was fine. I then took the new cable and connected it to the router from the cable modem and although the LAN connectivity was fine, there was still no internet connectivity (orange light on the router, and no connectivity according to the router control pages). Since I knew that the cable modem could connect fine I went to Best Buy and got a warrantee replacement. Well, it turned out that the replacement R8000 couldn't connect either.

 

I of course then knew that it had to be something else, but not sure who to call, Comcast or Netgear. I did call Netgear tech support who walked me through the manual setup of the router, and had me set the mac address of the router to the address of my main computer where I was accessing the web setup pages. Amazingly, this did the trick and the router could then connect to the internet. I had tried resetting the router and cable modem several times before I got the replacement.

 

I don't know how the mac address was set up previously, but it HAD been working fine for several months until this morning. Can anyone give me any idea of what might have been happening?

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Babylon5
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: Internet Connectivity problems with R8000

Whenever you change the device that is connected to the cable modem you need to power cycle or reset the cable modem, this is because the ISP equipment uses the MAC address of the connected device to allocate your Public IP, and resetting the modem causes the change to be recognised. It may be that you simply didn’t hit on the correct sequence of connections / resets.

 

Setting the MAC address of the router to the same MAC address of the computer that had previously connected to the modem means that there is no effective change of MAC address when you switch between computer or router connected to the modem, and in that case no power cycle / reset is needed. If however you connect something else directly to the modem e.g. another computer, then the modem will need to be reset.

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Babylon5
NETGEAR Employee Retired

Re: Internet Connectivity problems with R8000

Whenever you change the device that is connected to the cable modem you need to power cycle or reset the cable modem, this is because the ISP equipment uses the MAC address of the connected device to allocate your Public IP, and resetting the modem causes the change to be recognised. It may be that you simply didn’t hit on the correct sequence of connections / resets.

 

Setting the MAC address of the router to the same MAC address of the computer that had previously connected to the modem means that there is no effective change of MAC address when you switch between computer or router connected to the modem, and in that case no power cycle / reset is needed. If however you connect something else directly to the modem e.g. another computer, then the modem will need to be reset.

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wa1oui
Aspirant

Re: Internet Connectivity problems with R8000

What you said makes sense... I may have had two problems... a bad router, and modem IP confusion when I installed the new router... We'll never know, but it's an idea.

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