Pulling My Hair Over Double NAT Internet Connectivity Issue

This is not really a hack, but a solution to the Netflix connectivity problem I’ve had for months. My WAN connection had a brief, less than a second long break like a clockwork just about every eight minutes. Normally, this wouldn’t be a big deal, but it affected YouTube, Netflix and most Internet radio stations.

Every time the break occurred Netflix and YouTube would stall and require to hit F5 to reload the page. This was very annoying, and if left untended, Netflix would continue wasting minutes although picture was frozen on the screen.

I tried too many things to mention and spent a lot of time on the phone with all kinds of tech support people until I spoke to a brilliant tech support guy from Buffalo, the maker of my router. Although I am not even using the router’s stock firmware, this guy pointed out that there was a double NAT between the DSL modem and the router.

The modem was authenticating with my DSL provider and serving DHCP to the router. Ideally, you want the modem to act as just a dumb modem and have the router handle everything else. I logged into the modem, disabled the authentication, logged into the router and enabled PPoE authentication there. The problem was solved, no more Netflix glitches.