In my experience, the Network Extender's biggest weakness is the lack of robustness in connecting to wherever it connects to (some Verizon Wireless server, but where?) via the WAN port. Unit will be fine for a number of days then go offline with a flashing red SYS indicator then sometimes hours later, reestablish a connection. Today for example, I power cycled my NE several times and it still took well over an hour to finally get its act together. That is AFTER it ran both of our cell phone batteries all the way down since it was offline and there are NO Verizon digital services where I am in northern Vermont.
This is in an environment where I experienced no other Internet related problems during the time of the outage.
There seems to be no way to "ping" the unit or otherwise test its connectivity other than perhaps trying to add or delete a VZW cell phone number from its priority list, an action which simply fails if the NE is offline.
Does anyone have any information about how to get Verizon Wireless to check the status of one's NE for you?
