Router Doesn’t Work After Replace New Modem – AT&T Tech Support Sucks

by M

THE CAUSE: private IP address conflict, the new modem’s and the router’s first 3 octets are the same i.e 192.168.1.X

THE SOLUTION: change your router’s third octet of its IP address to something between 2-254 such as 192.168.2.1

So I have offered the fix right up front for those who don’t give a rat’s ass about my miserable story. If you have some free times and don’t have anything better to do then feel free to continue reading my frustrated experience.

So last week my home suffered internet brownout, it kept on dropping connection 8-9 times within a 15-min interval. Restarting the modem gave me a good couple minutes of up time before it went out again. I had to deal with the AT&T  “tech support” for more than an hour because I know it was not the problem on my side. It further irritated me because the Indian ‘tech support’ dude treated me like his 80-year old grandpa or somethin’. He intellectually taught me one of the most esoteric ninja technique of the AT&T clan, the paper-clip-up-the-modem’s-restart-hole move. The hole that I have poked 1000s times before calling him. It obviously didn’t work, so he proceeded to enlighten me with the bangin–them-modems-against-the-wall-till-it-works move. It didn’t work either, okay I made that one up. Long story short, he couldn’t get it back up and a local AT&T technician would come to my house the next day to get things fixed.

AT&T tech support – hella cool or what?

The “technician” came the next morning when I was at school. He deemed that our modem was broken and charged 60 something bucks for a new one. Dad asked if he could also help hooking up the router, he was eager to help but his my-customer-is-number-uno smile soon disappeared after half an hour struggling with the router but failed miserably. My dad felt that it’s not his responsibility to set up our router so he let him go. So I got home in a puzzling state thinking all you have to do is connect the Ethernet cable and that’s all to it (that’s how it’s always been done before) but I surely underestimated the issue.

I have 2 routers, a Linksys WRT55AG and an old Airlink 101. No matter what I did, they just wouldn’t work with the new modem and there’s no way both of them can be broken at the same time . As it turned out, there was a little twist to it and it took me quiet some times to figure it out. The problem was simply, ready? private IP address conflict. Wow, that was crazy, wasn’t it? My old broken modem was the Siemens SpeedStream 4100 with 192.168.0.1 as its default address. The AT&T guy replaced it with a new Westell modem which has 192.168.1.254 as its default address. And guess what, that’s where the problem stems. Most routers have192.168.1.1 as their private IP address (at least my Linksys and Airlink model do) – if your routers have something else, consider yourself lucky. Have you noticed that the first 3 octets are the same? The 192.168.1.X part; to fix it all you have to do is change  the number 1 in the third octet to something between 2-254; I just changed mine to 192.168.2.1 for the sake of simplicity. Restart both the router and modem (pulling the power off and plug back in) and everything should work perfectly fine like the good old days.

For those who have no idea what I’m talkin’ about then follow this step-by-step explanation:

1. Hook the router and the modem up as normal, you won’t be able to go on the internet but you can still access your router’s admin page.

2. Fire up a web-browser, enter the 192.168.1.1 in the URL bar

3. Enter username/password. If you didn’t set them up, enter the default username/password set my the router’s manufacturer – check your router’s manual

4. Look around and find your network setup then change the third number of the IP address to any number between 2-254. e.g 192.168.2.1 or whatever

5. Save setting and restart both router/modem.

₪