5G/LTE Home Internet Gateway Ping Failure

[tkmonkev]

We have had LTE home internet for some time and up until 2 or 3 weeks ago we have had no complaints. Recently, however, it seems like converage in our area has tanked and our service has been very, very flakey (as have our cells phones when used at home). Signal strength has been poor and the internet gateway seems to disconnect from the WAN frequently. Sometimes the gateway seems to be able to reconnect and service is restored without having to take any steps to remedy and other times the gateway has to be power cycled to restore connection for all clients.

We are very frustrated, have called support many times and more recently I have been looking at the gateway web admin page to try to ascertain what exactly is happening. Looking through various logs I see output which does indeed appear to indicate that the wan sees some event where it goes down and then most often there will be another event indicating the wan is up again. Quite often, however, after one of these events the status on the gateway says it is online but clients still claim that there is no internet connectivity. 

I have a Cisco ASA firewall and initially I thought that perhaps when the gateway went offline and then back on that maybe the firewall was not able to negotiate a new IP address for some reason because most often the gateway will have a brand new IP address when it reconnects. In looking at the firewall admin screen however during periods where this has happened I see that in fact the DHCP client on the firewall is able to successfully request a lease on the new IP address and the DHCP logs on the gateway confirm the successful conversation. In spite of this, however, I am unable to ping the gateway from the firewall admin screen. 

I am by no means a network engineer but I would conclude that if the firewall is not able to communicate with the gateway then things are not going to work. I am inclined to believe that this must indicate some fault with the gateway but like I said I don't have a lot of experience in this area and am hoping someone else might have some thoughts to share on why I am seeing this behavior. 

[vzw_customer_support]

Tkmonkev, thank you for reaching out with your connection concern. Let's investigate further. You said that all devices seems to be experiencing lower connectivity, was this all at the same time? How far are you needing to travel for service to improve? 

-Melissa

[tkmonkev]

Hi Melissa,

In answer to your questions, yes, all of the devices in the home (3 cell phones and and internet gateway) have all had issues with connections lately and often all of the devices would get disconnected at once - cell phones would all indicate the cellular connection was SOS and the status light on the gateway would turn red. The cellular tower is a little less than a mile from our home but I cannot say if moving closer to the tower made the signal stronger or not - it honestly seems like the signal disappears completely and it is not just a matter of the signal being weak rather it is non-existent. The gateway system status page supports this assertion as during periods when it disconnects it shows both LTE and 5G signal strength being 0 dB. We have been fighting with multiple disconnects per day for the last 3 weeks and I finally scheduled installation of a cable internet system next week. Oddly I don't believe we have seen a disconnect in the last 24 hours but I am inclined to keep my cable installation appointment and will plan on calling Verizon to cancel my internet service once the cable is setup. I don't feel that Verizon support did much to address our concerns and and to make us feel that corrective actions were being taken and that resolving our problem was a priority for them.