said by Thinkdiff:I don't believe this is entirely true. The role of the Actiontec is two-fold. It does open various ports, as you mentioned, but once these are known (they're sequential), you can replicate them on any third party router.
I referenced the ability to replicate these easily. However the specific port to which VZ needs to connect differs depending on which STB/DVR is the target. This mapping is not known until VZ creates the initial establishment. And while they may be sequential, they are not always predictable. For instance I had a single DVR and it was not at the documented starting port (it was one higher) for quite some time. Once this mapping is established it is not specifically required for this purpose, until your IP changes (see below).
The second part is that the Actiontec communicates back to Verizon what your public IP address is. When you use Remote DVR online, it pulls from that database and then tries to make the connection.
Yes, this would be part of the initial setup and as long as your IP does not change then there is no need to report the IP back to VZ. This is (as you noted) the reason for the three-router configuration so that one does not need to keep swapping routers.
From the best I have been able to determine so far it is the STB/DVR that is reporting its internal and external IPs along with the internal port that it is listening on for each service. If VZ sees a change it reaches out to the actiontec at that external IP and ensures there is a port forward to reach the internal port at the internal IP. The STB/DVR determines its external IP from interaction with the actiontec but I have not identified how this occurrs yet. The three router solution is working well for me so this is not a priority at the moment.
As I noted in my original reply, as well, if nobody has demonstrated and provided a configuration for remote services such as remote DVR to work without the actiontec there is no reason to assume it should. My points were mostly to highlight that the actiontec is needed at least for the initial setup and that without it success should not be expected. Beyond that, there are too many unknowns to know if the AT can be fully removed while keeping full remote services functionality. To date it does not look possible.