When I got there, she explained that she had been on the phone with Verizon for something like 4 hours that day and finally called me.  Why she didn’t call right away, I don’t know.  Anyway, I ran through my battery of tests and everything seemed to be configured correctly, Netgear router, Westell 6100 modem and Windows XP were communicating correctly.  I could ping my office computers by IP address, but when I used pinged them using the domain name I would get some other IP address  And, when I tried to get on a web site I would be redirected to Verizon to “authenticate”.  Verizon had hijacked the connection.

I exhausted what I could do.  Nothing was wrong.  I called Verizon and got a tech on the phone.  He started to run through his spiel and I cut him off and told him what problem I was having in terms that he knew, that I knew what, what I was doing.  He then immediately asked me to log in to the modem and type in this URL:

http://192.168.1.1/verizon/redirect.htm

I did that and was greeted with a warning that this was a “Verizon Only” page and that I had to be authorized to access it.  Also on the page was a single button that said “Disable”.  The tech asked me to click on that button and the connectivity was restored.

Apparently when the power goes out on the modem for a long enough time, the bit on this redirect is switched back to deny access until authenticated.  The tech that my customer didn’t get this during her four hour ordeal with the previous Verizon tech.  She is certainly capable of typing in a URL, but the previous tech had her install all the Verizon crap like toolbars  in Firefox and IE during the troubleshooting process.  Complete unnecessary and the first thing I uninstalled when I got there.

Why post this?  I had not come across this particular problem before so it’s mostly for a reminder to me.  But also, to save you time and money.  If you have Verizon Internet service and have a power outage and suddenly find yourself locked out of the Internet, give the above URL a visit and save yourself a couple hours of headaches.

My router has a one year warranty. I’m in year two of having FIOS for my Internet and phone service. No replacement router for me. The support technician said that I could use any ethernet router with the service. It didn’t need to be a Verizon router unless I have Verizon TV over FIOS. I don’t, so the extra Linksys router that I had in the closet would work out great. Except it didn’t. I googled “Verizon FIOS Linksys router” and found a lot of information that indeed the Linksys router would work with my FIOS, but the stupid thing wouldn’t sync. I figured that this router was also broken. That was next to impossible. The Linksys worked when I put it away a couple years ago. It should work.

Another call to Verizon to see if I was doing something wrong. Jason, the Verizon FIOS tech gave me the answer that the first tech didn’t and the Google search didn’t as well.

When you change the router from any one to another with the Verizon FIOS service you have to ask Verizon to do a “DHCP release”. That was the magic word that I needed to ask for. I plugged in the Linksys router, Jason did some configuration magic, and voila! I have Internet access again.

I hope that I put the right keywords so that someone else with this problem can find the article.