VL600 failing ? Connection drops to 6%, tap it, goes to 90%

Question

For about the last year and a half it's worked great. We use it for our primary internet connection since we live in an area not served by cable or dsl internet. Verizon has a new tower less than a mile from us so we always get a connection of 88-92%, recently the connection has been dropping to 6%, then jumping back to 90% then back down again. Today when it was sitting at 6% I flicked the modem to see what would happen and it instantly jumped back 88%, leads me to think the modem has a bad internal connection.
Anyone else have this happen and off hand anyone know if it's under warranty after approximately 18 months ?

Answer 1

I was experiencing the same problem (or something similar). Spent the whole morning trying to reset the airport express several times, update firmware, etc. Called my provider (Kotnet in Leuven, Belgium, so few others would use it!) and they assured me they hadn't done anything that would affect me (I don't believe it entirely), etc.
Essentially, yesterday everything worked fine. This morning I got the flashing amber light indicating that the AE wasn't getting an internet connection, though my Powerbook could establish one (and share it with another computer) using the same ethernet cable I use with the AE. I tried everything I could think of and everything suggested on the forum that seemed promising.
Then I fixed it with one change that no one (that I had found) had suggested. Under Network in the Airport Setup configuration panel, I first deselected the setting for Distribute IP Addresses. After Updating, I noticed that the light remained green, though when I selected Distribute IP Addresses again, and updated, of course it reverted to flashing amber. So I tried changing from "Use 10.0.1.1 addressing" to "Use 192.168.1.1 addressing." This matched the IP address I got when it did work.
Either something happened in the night to change my setting (and unless I had been hacked, I don't know what would have done that) or my service provider changed the setting on the router I communicate with. Kotnet is a direct ethernet connection to the internet, so there's no cable modem or anything between me and their network.
I'm writing this in the hope that it might help those of you with a similar problem. Try switching the "Use xxxxx addressing" settings. I wish I'd done this before resetting to factory defaults, etc. (but I did update my firmware, which sounds like it was worthwhile even if it didn't help my problem).
To test whether your AE network settings are causing the problem when sharing the internet connection, turn that feature off.