Experiencing Disconnects Every Few Minutes? Possible helpful tip

[Apocrolypse]

I wanted to post this here as I already posted this on the netgear forums. I struggled for a while but finally solved my issues described below:

 

This could help some with more than just the XR500. I had been experiencing constant disconnects which sometimes felt random and at other times were oddly evenly timed. It took me a couple months of trying to figure out but when I finally did it I felt it was worth sharing. The crux of my disconnects had to do with having a double NAT problem (ie a router with a router/modem combo). I had set everything with how I thought was the best possible setup. This setup consisted basically with my router/modem in bridge mode and my XR500 acting as the router.

 

This is where I went wrong without realizing it for months. The bridge mode on my router/modem did not work as expected. From my amateur understanding the router/modem should have disabled its router functionality and only acted as a modem. After months I finally came across a program to track the ip pings and packet loss (not sure I explained that well). It turned out that even in bridge mode I was registering 2 local IP addresses. This meant I had a private network behind a private network. Not sure how this affect all setups but with my XR500 it rendered me utterly useless in certain games as I would unexpectedly disconnect frequently throughout the game.

 

The way that I found to solve this was to put my router/modem back into its normal setup (aka disable bridge mode). I then disabled all wifi networks on the router/modem and only connected 1 outgoing ethernet from the router/modem to my XR500 router. I then reserved the IP address of my XR500 router on my ISP combo router/modem. Then I also turned on the DMZ function to only the reserved IP. Following this my internet woes appeared to be SOLVED!

 

Hopefully I didn't do anything wrong or frowned upon but I wanted to share this in case it helps anyone else. Currently I have finally purchased my own seperate netgear modem (with no router functionality) so I don't even run this setup anymore. I figured it was worth mentioning as I'm not sure I could easily find it anywhere on the forums. Also, any related verbage tended to talk about resetting firmware and doing factory resets which did not help me at all. Anyways, hopefully this helps some people and good luck!

[Netduma Alex]

Wow, this is really useful information. It sounds like some modem/routers don't do bridge mode correctly. That's worth keeping in mind for future cases of frequent disconnects...