NOTE: If you are coming to this article after Googling the subject in frustration, here’s the quick-fix for you: Upgrade the modem’s firmware to QAQ01-31.00L.33 or later and you should be fine.
Update: Anonymous below points out that he was still unable to get his WAP connecting to Q1000 and it giving the “MTU too low” error even after applying the firmware. The fix for him was to set the Q1000 router in “Strict-N” mode, none of the B/G/N or dual-broadcast modes. I did not need to do this as I run my Q1000 in G/N mode, but it might be worth a try if you are still having trouble with this after following the guide below.
Qwest has been rolling their new high-speed fiber-optic DSL service out throughout Denver and Arizona for the last year or so (it’s not fiber-to-the-house, but with 40mbps available, who cares?). I’ve been a happy Qwest DSL client for about 3 years now — no complaints and more importantly — no outages.
When the fiber service started rolling out with speeds of 12mbps and 20mbps offered, I would reflexively crap my pants and throw myself into jealous rages because it wasn’t available in my area — that all changed last week.
Not only has Qwest rolled out fiber in my area, they also rolled out a new 40mbps/20mbps service as well for $115/mo — that doesn’t have any bearing on this post, it’s just awesome.
Anyway, I ordered the 20mbps/5mbps service which required an upgrade to the Actiontec Q1000 Qwest-branded modem. This is a Gigabit-capable 4-port modem with Wireless-N capabilities — I’ve had Actiontec equipment in the past from Qwest and it was garbage — replaced within months by 2wire which worked much better. Fortunately after a week with this Q1000 it looks like Actiontec may have cleaned some things up, the modem works fine with some basic firewall, port forwarding and advanced routing rules — this was something the older Actiontec modem that Qwest was selling couldn’t no — no joke, it literally couldn’t employ port forwarding rules AND the firewall at the same time — fail.
Anyway, after getting the Q1000 setup and the service enabled, I hooked my Xbox 360 via a WAP (I’ll give a review of later) and when I tried to get the Xbox online, I would get an error similar to the following:
Unable to connect to Xbox live, the MTU setting of your router is less than 1365 and must be increased. Please fix the problem and try again.
There is literally no MTU setting anywhere on the Q1000 — and reading through some other threads online, folks had suggestions ranging from disabling uPnP all the way to manually changing the MTU settings on your Windows machine (yea, I have no idea how they thought that would help).
As the threads went on, more and more folks said upgrading the firmware did the trick for them and magically the Xbox 360 started working again without any problems.
This sounded easy enough, but believe it or not, I was actually confused by the Upgrade Firmware screen on the Q1000 — on the older 2wire I had, there was a button that I clicked that would check the firmware against the remotely available version and then upgrade it if available — it also automatically upgraded itself constantly too (which got annoying after a while).
On the Q1000, there is simply a Download button and you end up with a file that has no identifying name or type, just firmware.
Believe it or not, this s all fine — and it worked great. So I’ll give you the instructions on how to update your firmware incase you are bamboozled by this — and get your Xbox 360 back online:
- Go to 192.168.0.1 (or whatever IP address you gave your modem)
- Login to your modem — I believe the default credentials are “admin” or “admin”/”admin” or just try password “admin” — it’s one of those.
- Go to Utilities
- Click Upgrade Firmware in the left menu
- Click the Download button in section #1 — you will likely be prompted to safe a file named “firmware”, save it anywhere on your local computer.
- Now scroll down to section #2, and click the Browse button and select that “firmware” file you saved.
- Now scroll down to section #3, and click the Upgrade Firmware button, this will upload the file you just saved and apply it then restart the modem
And you should be all set. Let us know if you run into any problems. Happy gaming!
Thank you for the help. This was the oly thing that worked, I just wish i would have looked here first before i spent three hours trying to figure this out with Qwest tech support. Thank you.
hey i got a 360 and i dont have enough mtu it says i have to get like 1350 i tried everything turn off wait 20min check all videos i dont know wat to do
Mike how is your 360 connected to your router, wired or wireless?
Also what router do you have? This post was for the Actiontec Q1000.
Sam,
I’m just glad I could help — after I did the Xbox-dance with the new Q1000 and almost lost all hope, I knew I had to post it to make it easy to find incase anyone else ran into it.
1 other thing you might want to do, is on the Firewall settings for the Q1000, you can check the “Xbox” and/or “PS2/PS3″ rules to allow inbound settings if you are gaming online and everything works smooth as butter. I’ve been really damn happy with this service for about a month now.
You rock! Such an easy fix for a disastrous problem. Can’t thank you enough for the great post. Let’s bring Tina Turner out here for a proper celebration of your greatness shall we? Cue music – “Simply the best” (Title fits, not necessarily a fan of the Turn-ster)
Thanks again!!!
Mark glad I could help!
Thank you very much for posting this!!! Very helpful!!! It’s people like you that give the internet a good name. I was a long way from thinking of a firmware upgrade. Thank you for the insight.
Ben, you just made my day! I’m glad I could help from a hair-pulling experience. Especially when you want to get online with your new fiber service and play some MW2 and can’t
Thank you Riyad,
Qwest support really dropped the ball on this one.
We appreciate your help.
One question though.
I’m not getting the MTU error and the xbox360 can see the Q1000 but when I try to connect to Windows Live it says there is a problem with the connection.
We tried everything and made sure the Username, Password and Network name was correct to no avail.
What else should we be configuring?
Any ideas would be great….
Thanks in advance:)
Dave,
How are you connecting the Xbox to the Q1000? Did you wire it directly or use a wireless adapter OR wire it to a WAP and then have the WAP in Client mode connect to the Q1000?
I’m asking because I want to rule out any internal configuration issues and just hook the Xbox as directly as you can to the Q1000.
Has the Xbox ever successfully gotten online before?
You might want to check your Firewall settings — that shouldn’t effect the basic Xbox Live test, but just incase. You can get to it by going to: http://192.168.0.1/advancedsetup_firewallsettings.html (or whatever IP you gave your modem) and scrolling down to the “Xbox” rule and enabling it.
NOTE: You won’t see any rules listed if the Firewall is off.
Thanks for posting this!!!!!!!!!!!!!! HUGE HELP!!
Cheers!
I tried this update, going to version QAQ01-31.00L.34. This is in conjunction with a new wifi adapter for my 360, one of the ones that uses wireless N. My wireless G adapter works, tho occasionally it dies for no apparent reason and has to be unplugged and plugged back in. So you can see why I want to use the new adapter.
next I’m going to try forcing just wireless G on the router to see if the adapter works in that fashion (which is less than ideal since I’d prefer the best speeds possible with my 40mb dsl.. but yeah)
On a lark I tried forcing strict N mode, instead of any of the other ‘balanced’ modes and this time everything just worked. So one extra tip out there for you guys.. try forcing strict N mode on your actiontec q1000 if you are using an N adapter in your 360 and it won’t connect. It was still throwing the mtu error before by the way, before I switched to strict N.
Anon, great tip. I’ll update the post with your findings. Thanks for posting them!
Thanks for the help, got rid of the MTU problem but for some reason my xbox 360 (slim with 802.11n wireless built-in) cannot connect to my Q1000 modem when set of performance mode… (802.11n only) Instead I have to leave it on balanced mode (both G and N) for my xbox to connect. Any ideas on how to fix this?
Steven719, that is weird.
If you set the modem in G-only mode, does the Xbox Slim still connect? I know that sounds silly, but I’m just wondering if the built in wifi is doing something stupid.
Is the Wifi in the Slim G & N or just N? (I was pretty sure it was N-only, but the behavior seems odd).
I have tried changing my mtu settings, and it still is not working when trying to connect to the xbox live.
Any other things I can try?
Dawn,
Do you have the Qwest Q1000 modem? If so, you cannot adjust the MTU settings on the router (Which is the problem), you have to install the firmware update as noted by the original post.