I have recently had fios installed. I live in an apartment building and verizon's ONT box is apparently somewhere downstairs. In my apartment I was set up with a d-link dsl-6300v modem plugged into the telephone socket in the wall and a wireless router plugged into that. I am wondering about the role of the vdsl modem. When I had dsl service, verizon supplied a dsl modem plugged into the phone socket and I had my own wireless router that I plugged into their modem. The modem had an address on the internet, assigned by verizon, and assigned my wireless router an internal ip address. The router assigned further addresses to computers, tablets, etc. via dhcp. As far as I can tell, this new modem is more "transparent" than the old one and the new router gets an internet address directly from an external verizon server.
The old modem was evidently accessible from outside via some sort of interface, because at one point verizon contacted me to log into the modem and change its default password. I am wondering whether the new modem is also capable of being controlled from outside or whether it is just a "dumb" box whose role is to forward the signal from the ONT elsewhere in the building. From reading other posts on the forum, I gather that not everyone has such a vdsl modem with their fios service.
Can anyone tell me more about what the vdsl modem does? In particular does it have its own address, separate from that of the router, on either my internal network or the internet at large?
