Actiontec PK5000 Mac Wireless Connection Problems
Here's a quick post that I hope will save someone some pain out there. I was just sent an Actiontec PK5000 router from Qwest as a replacement for my Motorola 3347 Netopia due to slow Internet speeds in my home network. I've been dealing with a slow degradation of speed that brings my 12up/896k down speeds into the the 4-5mb down and 200-300 up range after only a couple hours of a fresh reboot of the Snow Leopard iMac and the router. I must give Qwest Kudos for listening online because they found my query via twitter (They're at @talktoqwest). They assigned what I'd describe as an "non-scripted excellent free thinking tech support" expert onto my case. Only 24 hours before I'd gone through "scripted step by step no outside the box thinking" tech support and the summarization was that "It's a problem on your end so thanks for calling." You know that drill. But Qwest really has done a great job in this case and I expect to get a call tomorrow to confirm that things are going well. That 3347 modem was ALWAYS a bit sketchy IMHO. The guy who installed it had to replace it to get decent speed on "go live" day. So far I'm still cruising around 10mb down and 725k up so perhaps my speeds will be stable from here on out. I'm getting full speed to the router...so I think that's about as good as it will get???
Well I've set up my Actiontek PK5000 and for the life of me couldn't get my Mac Airport wireless to connect to the network. I used the same SSID that I had before...so I figured same settings, same password, reboot the machines...and I'm good. Wrong. After struggling for hours my solution was less elegant but effective. I simply had to change my SSID to a brand new one that "My Mac's had never seen". I'm not sure what's up in the Mac Airport wireless configuration that prevents the machines from "forgetting the old and looking for the new" but that seems to be the only thing I can come up with. I thought there was some kind of DHCP issue or something but my non-technical view is that "The Mac just wouldn't forget the OLD IP address it was given by the old router/modem." I know that's not very technical but you know. So changing the network name (SSID) to a new one and setting up the network fresh got all devices on board just fine. Now my wife is not going to harm me from lack of web access and I'm able to get the snow storm weather alerts via wifi on my phone. That is all.
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