Airport extreme drops out connection daily

[sakis_s]

I bought an Airport Extreme 6th generation router and I'm not able to make internet stable. It is connected through Ethernet on a DSL modem and it keeps drop out internet connection two - three times per day. When internet drops out, airport led remains always solid green and the only thing that works to recover connection, is to turn off DSL modem and back on (if I reboot airport connection doesn't re-establish, problem solves only when restarting DSL modem). I have tried hard reset airport extreme a couple of times, give a static ip to airport but nothing works. It drives me crazy. Any ideas to try are much appreciated.

 

[Fishrrman]

Important questions:
Is the DSL modem you have ONLY "a modem"?
Or... is it a "residential gateway" -- that is a combined modem+router?

If it's a residential gateway, I'd let the gateway "be the router" but turn its wireless off.
Then, I'd set up the Airport in "bridge mode" (routing off) to handle the wifi only.

This is just what I did here, and it worked beautifully for over 6 years.
Actually, it's still working, but I now also have a Linksys "Velop" mesh setup working too.

 

[sakis_s]

Important questions:
Is the DSL modem you have ONLY "a modem"?
Or... is it a "residential gateway" -- that is a combined modem+router?

If it's a residential gateway, I'd let the gateway "be the router" but turn its wireless off.
Then, I'd set up the Airport in "bridge mode" (routing off) to handle the wifi only.

This is just what I did here, and it worked beautifully for over 6 years.
Actually, it's still working, but I now also have a Linksys "Velop" mesh setup working too.

Hi and thanks for your response!
Yes it is a modem-router that I used to connect my devices directly until I decided to buy the Airport extreme but doesn't seem to going well so far. I have already set up airport as bridge and turned off wireless signal from DSL router. This doesn't seem to be the problem. Any other ideas?

 

[Ledgem]

If you have to restart the DSL router, it seems almost like that's the point of failure, rather than the Airport. (Although oddly, in recent months I've noticed that my Airports won't properly detect when the internet connection has been cut, and need to be rebooted before they'll attempt to recover the connection. Never used to be an issue...) You could test that by taking the Airport out of the loop and checking if the connection remains stable or not. If it's unstable, check with your company about getting a replacement.

Alternately, back when I used DSL, the modem-router I had did have an option to complete disable routing functions. It was complete, as once you enabled it, the only way to re-enable it was to factory-reset the modem; it wasn't accessible by web browser, or anything of that sort. It worked beautifully for stability. Perhaps your DSL modem has a similar option?

 

[boast]

Try disabling ipv6 on the airport.

 

[Gav2k]

when you have the issue have you tried plugging a computer into the modem and seeing if the issue exists then?

 

[sakis_s]

Thank you so much for your answers! DSL router never drops off internet connection. I have tested it many times. Besides it used to be my basic router all these years with no issues until I decided to upgrade with the airport extreme. I have tried many different options with the airport extreme and for 3 days now it has a stable connection. The setting that seems to fixed the problem is changing the country. I use airport extreme to Europe (Greece) and in settings it has options only for US relative locations plus Canada. Since I choose Canada as location, airport has stable connection and never dropped off since this setting. I have no idea if this is the reason that keeps connection stable, because I have changed settings many times but I think it's the last thing I tried and seems to work. Let's see in the near future..