Solved: WAN Dropping with AC68U and bridged SAGEMCOM (Bell) modem

[pcbrand]

Hi folks,

This is for the people who use the Sagemcom F@ast 2864 modem which is very common with Bell and the ISPs who use Bell infrastructure.

Hopefully this saves some time and frustration.

I have been chasing this issue for a while, load up a lot of traffic on the router (eg. torrents or several video streams) and the router reports that the WAN is disconnected in the log file. At the same time the modem reports everything is ok and there is no synch lost. The WAN would come back in 1-2 minutes, but it was very frustrating for a multi-user household and voip. I could easily replicate this issue by loading up multiple popular torrents to soak up the whole bandwidth, the connection would drop within a few minutes.

What is even more frustrating is that my old and slower router did not cause this issue, only the AC68... So naturally the first place to look was the new router and the firmware (Asus and Merlin), but that was not the source of the problem.

After several months of troubleshooting and trying different things, nothing really solved it.

Apparently the issue is with the Sagemcom modem and the custom firmware that is on it that makes is incompatible with the current VDSL network and modern high speed routers. Since there is no new firmware available or expected to be available, the only solution is to replace the modem. You can search for the infamous sync-no-surf bug and will find a wealth of information about how this modem has many issues that are firmware related.

If you are lucky you can contact your provider and request a replacement modem (mine did it for free + cost of shipping back the Sagemcom). If you brought your own modem, you are probably out of luck and will have to pay for a new modem.

I have received a SmartRG 505N modem as a replacement and can confirm the problem is now fixed. I was not able to break the connection no matter how much traffic I threw at it.

Good luck.

 

[RMerlin]

Those Sagemcom (especially with Bell's firmware) are just plain bad. Even when used as a router they will be highly unstable. One of my customers with one kept having random Internet drops. They were told by a Bell tech that they should not use the Sagemcom as a router but only as a modem, and that they should bridge it to use an external router. Said tech was obviously not up to speed on the products he was supposed to service, since Bell's sabotaged firmware does NOT allow switching to bridged mode...

Their 2wire is another pile of junk. Another customer saw their age old BEFSR81 die of old age. Wanting to save them the cost of a new router, I reconfigured their 2wire to act as the main router. It only took a week before the customer had me come back, switch it to Super DMZ mode, and install an Asus RT-N12 to handle routing, because they kept losing Internet connectivity. Moving routing duties to the RT-N12 fixed their issues.

ISPs need to either start shipping quality products, or stop sabotaging firmwares in a way that prevents you from properly using your own router in front of them. Some are better than others, but Bell ranks pretty low there. Their last "usable" modem was the Speedstream 4200, which was fully bridgeable. Everything since then has been horrible.