Resolved SSL connection establishment flaky on U-verse router

I recently switched from AT&T's DSL service to U-verse. It's their 300-level service; one bug report out there implied that routers work differently at different levels of U-verse service. I'm noticing flaky performance when establishing SSL connections. Symptoms:

1. Establishing an SSL connection is sometimes instantaneous and sometimes takes ~1 minute and sometimes never works.
2. If I establish a tunneling VPN connection (with ProXPN free demo), all problems disappear. Problem is clearly in the U-verse router and not my Apple computers.
3. If I go into Chrome incognito mode, SSL connection establishment is typically instantaneous, but not always.
4. I sometimes see a "bad certificate" message from the router.

I think whatever SSL certificate checking the router is doing is broken. I'd like to turn all of that nonsense off. Has anyone figured this out? Thanks.

 

I believe the problem is resolved. The best source of information I found was this discussion here on dslreports.com .

The problem appears to be related to requesting a dns lookup when https connections are being established. Apparently, the router is attempting to establish a connection over IPv6, and this connection must time out (about 60 seconds) before the lookup fails over IPv4. I disabled IPv6 on the NVG589 modem:

http://192.168.1.254/cgi-bin/etherlan.ha and turned off IPv6 in the pull-down menu on that page, and clicked the SAVE button.

I'm not really comfortable with this solution. I have yet to see a lucid explanation why it's happening. Is there a bug in the NVG589's firmware? Is there a problem connecting with my Airport Extreme router to the NVG589? I don't know. AT&T doesn't seem to have any sort of service bulletin posted anywhere on this problem. If anyone has a good story about what's happening, please add it to this discussion. Thanks.