Frontier Communications → [Internet] Unable to bridge new Frontier modems?

Evening everyone... I work with a bunch of small businesses in Central PA. The majority of them are using Frontier for internet, connecting with a Siemens Gigaset SE567 modem, in bridge mode, connecting to a router/firwall/Cisco VPN device.

Frontier has been pushing higher speed plans to a bunch of our clients, replacing modems and breaking the internet in their office. We get the call that Frontier is on site to make the change.

Frontier techs are saying that they are unable to bridge the new modems... that their hardware won't support it (but our Frontier guy isn't techy... he's just following off what his papers say to him). They're trying to put out Netgear 7550 in most places, but we have 3 businesses scheduled that they are trying to put in Actiontec V1000.

My question is.... Does Frontier really NOT support putting these modems into bridge mode? They never did on the SE567's and they always came back with "well, we can't see your modem since it is in bridge mode, so we can't help..." - But we deal with enough clients to know if there is a Frontier issue or if it's something related to that client directly.

Thoughts? Suggestions? If the modems (or if Frontiers back end) really can't support a bridge mode setup... how do we proceed with setup? How is Frontier going to sell a product that just doesn't work with their businesses? Nobody is going to give up their firewalls to switch to a craptastic modem.

The Frontier tech and I were on site at one of these clients today. Tech had programmed the modem, put it in place and confirmed he had internet on his laptop. Speedtest showed 18MB down, 2MB~ up.

I forget what new service the Frontier tech had said they were pushing out... But he said that the service itself wouldn't accept the bridged modem and that it didn't matter hardware wise if we used our own modem, etc.

I did find some guides from searching here on how to put both the 7500 and v1000 into bridged mode... But it didn't seem to work while I was testing today.

V1000 in bridged mode, a Linksys WRT54G (just for test purposes) in place behind that... PPPOE setup with our credentials, and it just wouldn't grab an IP.

Bridging of the modems in really not supported.
Wouldn't a Static Business Class account allow them to keep their own firewalls? The customer gets a public address on their LAN to assign the firewall (or whatever) and he modem is setup as a router (no NAT).

said by SimonTuffGuy:

V1000 in bridged mode, a Linksys WRT54G (just for test purposes) in place behind that... PPPOE setup with our credentials, and it just wouldn't grab an IP.

If there was a active pppoe session it must be ended before another pppoe session can be started

I've been wondering the same thing, but it doesn't appear there's a straightforward way to bridge with the V1000W. I could bridge my old Actiontec GT724R, but the V1000 series firmware seems pretty half baked--they haven't even implemented the USB port on the back, and I can't find any documentation on what the WAN Ethernet port does (I guess it's a feature for Metro Ethernet? Does Frontier even offer that?)

What does the firmware look like? If you look around the connection settings is an option for "RFC 1483 Bridging" not available?

My Westell 7500 works in bridge mode with a Linksys E3000 setup with my PPPoE credentials.

This made me think about when I had this trouble with a se567. I never did find what was the actual cause. I tracked it as far as thinking it was some glitch with Frontier's DHCP system. If I did a modem reset to default and went in a did setup with a PC direct to the modem and not through negear router it would work. But if I set the se567 to bridge mode it killed it. I know that Frontier has used MAC address for IP reservation. So even if I reset the modem and didnt change to bridge mode it would still fail and lose the gateway and if I went into my router and tryed to renew the lease I would get realy weird result it would only give me an IP but no gateway or any other lease info at all just the IP. I have not tryed this but I will. I base this idea on the fact that frontier uses MAC's to reserve IP's. Do a default modem reset but spoof your routers mac to the PC you will use so that you dont use the routers default mac. Heres why one it could be a simple conflict with an allready registered mac or they did this intentionaly to make it hard to use your own router. would be easy for them to do because they know the mac address range of any of the big router manufacturers.

The reality seems to be that DSL providers love to claim they have "business class service" which in reality is just residential service at a higher cost.

I don't understand why they simply don't carry modems already set in bridge mode when they are flashed as they once did for those "business class customers".

Also in PA and we run into the same thing with Verizon. Some of the older modems that were factory programmed as bridge only devices are getting erratic. So Verizon sends someone out and claims the modem is bad. Understandable because some of these have been in service a long time. Then we get a call that the Verizon guy is on site with a modem set in router mode but he isn't allowed to configure it. Each time Verizon claims they never heard of a bridged only modem even though the one they are replacing is a bridge only device.