Edit: Next day, it was stalled again, either my MTU isn’t actually low enough, or, after talking to a huge letter certified Cisco Engineer buddy at the $DayJob, it might be a memory leak in my eBay purchased D-Link device. Going to try to get a better firmware for it after I go ahead and buy a better model router and try again.

Are you using Time Warner Cable (formerly known as RoadRunner) aka TWC?

Are you trying to use your own router after getting them to put the provided modem into bridge mode?

Do you have to restart your own attached router once or twice a day and otherwise dealing with really odd stability issues?

Several posts on the net highlight that TWC doesn’t use a standard MTU (Maximum Transmission Unit) size of 1500 and they couldn’t be more accurate. Many said to change to the minimum allowed or the default for dial-up of 576 (http://www.math.ucla.edu/~jimc/documents/bugfix/18-small-MTU.html), some said that they had to more or less disable requesting a MTU (http://blogger.ziesemer.com/2012/03/connection-reset-errors-mtu-dhcp-twc.html) and then another is suggesting a 1600 MTU (http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-2231649.html).

So in trying to find someone that has tested and found a solution other than some equipment that TWC says is “blessed” for their service, I kept looking.

It couldn’t be found, and it took me two hours of talking to their technical support, but I was able to find out their default MTU setting. Apparently it varies by modem/router, but they do have an approximate default.

It is:
1472

That’s all.

Well almost, more or less my Android was still hiccuping on the Wireless provided by my own D-Link router that I have connected to their Arris modem which is in bridge mode, until I disabled the WPA/WPA2 dual option and the AES/TKIP dual option and specified one to use (really, as far as security, you should generally use WPA2-AES – it is less hackable). Not sure why an (guessing) internal MTU of 1472 would cause hiccups with the WiFi but it was until I made that change.

Hope this helps someone else out there struggling to get out of the service fee for using Time Warner Cable’s built-in wireless on their cable modems. Please let me know if this helps you!

Almost almost all, I’ve only just now put this into testing. I will update this with my progress and see if it has reached a stability that allows me to not have to restart my router once or twice a day.

With tests, I found that there was likely a memory failure with the Netgear device I purchased. It has since been replaced with a Asus AC68U Router which has a rather full feature set.

Soon I will detail a page about some neat options it has.