New Customer - Port Forwarding Ordeal with Verizon Fios
Delondil
Enthusiast - Level 1

I'm a brand new Verizon customer, just signed up Thursday 8/30.

Right after I went live with Verizon, I found my peer to peer connections would no longer work due to the Router ( Actiontec mi424wr ).. So i called Verizon for help. After about an hour with a "level 1" tech support guy, they could not figure out how to get my problem fixed. Basically what I needed was port forwarding set up for a chat client. But no matter what they did, it wasn't working. So the tech told me couldnt help unless I buy more tech support. So they upped my case to their "Premier" tech support - at a fee of like $14 a month for 10 months and a cancellation fee! 

Thinking that Verizon of all people, knew their system, I agreed and spend the next 2 hours with reps in that department. I reset the router several times at their request, and they remote-controlled my system to try and set up configuration. Nothing worked. They could not get the port forwarding to work.  The rules were set up right, by all accounts, it should work.   After about 3 or 4 hours of this, they gave up and said it simply was NOT POSSIBLE WITH VERIZON. They blamed the Router and the software.  

So here I am, stuck with this service plan and no help.

Today, I continued in frustrating, trolling websites, until I came upon the "canyouseeme.org" site.  Curious, I clicked. It gave a totally different IP # than all the ones Verizon had been working with me on.  They had been working with 192.168.1.5  , when this website was showing {edited for privacy}...

I am blown away that I was robbed like this - hours and hours of tech support with their top tier, experts, managers and nobody out there considered this other IP address.  My friends plugged that 173 number in AND BINGO, they connected to me.   

Unbelievable.


If anyone out there is having port forwarding issues - try that IP - I mean I found this by total accident and I'm stunned that Verizons premier tech support didnt figure this out. Frankly I feel they used this as a tool to sucker a new customer into extra monthly fees.

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Re: New Customer - Port Forwarding Ordeal with Verizon Fios
Anthony_VZ
Master - Level 3

I am sorry for the troubles you had with your chat program. A couple things to let you know. Your 192.168 address is a private internal IP address. All computers internally to a network have a private IP address. This is so the router can talk to multiple devices inside the home. The router will have only 1 external IP address. That is the other number you were seeing when you went to the website. Anything over the internet that you do is sent from the internet to your external IP address. Then once the router receives it, it gives the internet information to the private IP address of the computer that requested it. You had posted for others having this problem to use that IP address, well that wont work for them. This is will not work for anyone else, because that number you posted in used for your internet connection only. They will have a different external IP address. When you setup portforwarding in the router, it is all done with internal IP addresses. This is because portforwarding is telling the router specifically which computer (by its internal IP address) to hand internet traffic to that comes in on a certain port. We supply your equipment and basic support to get working. When it comes to advanced setups or configuration, that is beyond normal use and basic support can't support it. This is when the customer can turn to a paid service such as our premium tech support or other services.

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