Using airport extreme in china - can't get it to work

Question

I just moved to china and have been trying to set up a new Airport Extreme dual band to my high speed internet connection but can't get it to work (bought the AE in the US and worked fine there). I have a Green light on the physical AE, and in Network Status section under Network Diagnostics I get green lights on Airport, Network Settings and ISP, but yellow/red on Internet and Server. The type of internet connection is direct, supplied by China Telecom with no router/modem in my unit, but with ethernet cable running directly to the phone room connection. I manually set up the AE using the same IP address, subnet, DNS as shows up when I plug the ethernet cable directly into my computer, with the internet working fine with a direct connection to computer and no AE.

Answer 1

What you did makes complete sense Mike, but if you don't have access to the router you may have to get your ISP to recognize your Extreme's MAC address:
AirPort Base Station: ISP provisioning may prevent Internet connection via broadband (cable or DSL)
For example: Suppose that you have a computer connected to a cable modem before purchasing an AirPort Base Station. Your Internet service provider might recognize your computer's MAC address as the correct one for your account. Your new base station then takes the position on your network that was formerly occupied by your computer, but you have not taken any action to let your Internet service provider (or its hardware) know the new address. The base station then sends packets to your Internet service provider that do not contain the required MAC address, and the packets are ignored.
It may be as simple as leaving everything disconnected from your service provider for a period of time. You might also try turning Connection Sharing "off" (bridge mode).