Tech Tip: Macs and Verizon’s Actiontec router

A few months ago, I switched from Charter’s cabe modem high speed Internet service to Veriaon’s FiOS service. I loved it then, and still do, but found myself constantly struggling with the wireless router that was part of the all-in-one FiOS modem and wireless router provided by Verizon. Obviously, it was very nice indeed for Verizon to provide me with a free wireless router, and I appreciate the gesture. It turns out though, that the Actiontec wireless router that they use is less than friendly with Macs.

Initially, both my MacBook Pro and my wife’s MacBook both worked fine with the router. Speeds were nice and fast, and were on par with what I would expect from a fiber connection directly to my house. After a few days though, my computer started acting stragely. It would drop the connection to the router fairly frequently, and even when it wasn’t busy dropping the connection, pages would load very slowly or not at all. A few days ago, my wife’s MacBook, which had worked fine this whole time, started doing the same thing.

I updated the firmware on the router (which did indeed need updating), and that didn’t help at all. So last night I went to Target and bought a nice simple Belkin wireless G router, which has solved all of my problems. Well not all of my problems, but all of my wireless networking problems.

I am again very happy with FiOS, and it’s behaving the way it is supposed to. I ran a speed test at DSLReports.com last night, and am back to my expected connection speeds. It looks like (crossing fingers) my wireless router battles are over for now.

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As an aside, it seems like the standard Verizon DSL wireless router works just fine with Mac systems. I have a few different clients who runs Macs with the DSL wireless router, and it seems to work fine. Weird.