Hey everyone,
I found this thread as I recently upgraded from the 35Mbps Extreme Plus plan to the 150Mbps Hybrid Fiber plan, and in doing so had to switch out my modem to the new CGN3 which has the latest 4.2.4.3 firmware installed. Originally, not being extremely technically savvy, I set it up the way I've used all previous modems; I would disable wireless on the modem itself, plug in my Linksys E4200 router, and plug away. At first, I was really happy- my speedtest showed consistently 190-200Mbps download and 14-16Mbps upload speeds.
I started to notice consistent issues though when I used the internet on a daily basis. I'm a frequent at-home VPN user and I'd keep getting disconnected/kicked from my Citrix app, an issue that I never had previously. The internet was still "connected", but it seemed to stutter every so often and hang for 30 seconds to a minute and then just start working again. Working on a presentation, etc, and having to reconnect using my RSA login became very frustrating. Even watching videos, playing games became a chore due to intermittent hanging and high latency.
I found this thread and switched the CGN3 to bridge mode, since I was using my own router anyways. This completely stabilized the internet. Unfortunately, I found that after a certain amount of time (between 1-2 days), it would stop working altogether. I checked my router settings and it seemed as though it had no IP address, guessing that some sort of issue or incompatability prevented the DHCP lease renew.
So here's what I was thinking:
1- Pick up a new router, which I didn't really want to do as I'd had no problems in the past... My router isn't the latest and greatest but even at 190-200Mbps the internet connection is still my bottleneck, not the router (on 5Ghz)
2- Mac address cloning. I read that this could fix some incompatability issues. I tried to clone my computer's Mac address in my router's setting. Now I don't know why, but as soon as I enabled Mac address cloning, my speedtests dropped to exactly half what they were previously, in the 90-100Mbps range. Upload speed wasn't impacted and remained at 15Mbps. I know that Mac address cloning isn't supposed to impact speed at all (given what I read from other threads), but for me, it did. I confirmed this several times as I'd do a factory reset and change only 1 setting at a time just for troubleshooting purposes. A quick "disable" of the Mac address cloning would shoot me right to 190-200Mbps.
3- On a whim, I changed the setting on my Linksys E4200 router "Client Lease Time" under Basic Setup, DHCP Server Settings. On a Factory Reset, Linksys defaults this to 0, and in the settings it says "0 means one day". I thought that whatever incompatability could be causing something else to interpret the 0 as an actual 0, instead of the one day. So I changed this value to 9999 (it ends up going to a 2-day lease, so I'm not sure if there's a more optimal value here than 9999).
It has now been over a week after trying #3 above and I haven't even had a slight issue with the internet since. Everything's super-smooth, I'm still getting 190-200Mbps speed tests, I haven't had a single disconnect.
Anyways, I'm not sure if my equipment was just acting up, but I wanted to share my experience in the event someone was having the same problem as it was quite frustrating for me.