Cincinnati Bell → Bridge mode westell fioptics modem?

I have the westel modem and for the life of me can't get it to let me get my FTP up from external access. I run everything through a DIR-655 modem, with port forwarding setup, but somehow it's not letting it through. Any help is appreciated.

Did you port forward through both the Westell and the DLink? (on Westell have ports forwarded to WAN IP of Dlink (should be manually set to static) and then on Dlink have ports forwarded to device(s) (IP's of desired devices should be static)). I've had success port-forwarding through the Westell A90 and my Linksys router.

Of course you can avoid port-forwarding through two routers or putting the Westell into bridge mode because you don't actually need to use the Westell. Since you have the Westy I'm assuming you've got FTTH. You're supplied with a routed IP direct from CBT's equipment on the other end. You can plug the CAT5 coming from the ONT directly into your own DLink router.

I'm not sure. I don't think I have FTTH, I still have a regular phone cord coming out of the wall hooked into the westell, with FTTH don't you have a cat 5 jack? I have the a90-9100vm60-10 version modem. The closest instructions I could find were for the verizon westell which is a bit different.

I look in the network connections menu and I see that it picks up my dlink as a switch and has LAN (NAT). So I disabled DHCP for that and the VDSL and my dlink is unable to obtain an IP address through the westell. I have to be missing something.

My bad. Based on your info it looks like you've got FTTN which is a DSL product. The Westell you have is a modem/router combo. I guess they used that Westell for a bit before changing to a different supplier.

For bridging the Westell see this thread: »Westell UltraLine Series 3 9100VM Bridging (Make modem only)

Third post explains how to do it.

Would this method not require that I still port forward through the westell if it is the one distributing the internal IPs? I really want my DLINK to be the firewall\routing. On my old time warner setup, my dlink device actually was the device that pulled the DHCP info from time warner and the docsis modem was straight pass through.

Looks like I got it. I just edited the existing network bridge the modem created and edited the bridge to include wan vdsl and it appears to work. The ip I get is no longer static and changes every time the dlink resets, but it's better than nothing and my ftp now works.

I did something similar for a friend in order to eliminate the double natting, but the downside is that after doing it I was unable to communicate with the Westell any longer through the web interface. Fortunately, in bridge mode one shouldn't have to communicate to it, but that's the risk. I just left it that way since things work right for him now, so I don't know if there is a reset button on it that will put it back to a factory setup that would allow communication with it again.