Verizon mifi issue. Verizon of no help.

[myredracer]

Have been using a Verizon jetpack on a pay-as-you-go plan for about 5 years no problem and use it for camping only in the summer. Has always been very reliable except for spotty reception on the Oregon coast depending on location.

We're currently in Welches OR, near Mt. Hood for about 2 weeks. Previous to being here, we were up in Chehalis WA and the mifi worked great there. First couple of days here in Welches, the Verizon worked great. Then it stopped working. Contacted Verizon and they could not figure it out and said they would "escalate" it. 3 days later, we did not hear back. Another call to Verizon and they said it might be the SIM card so we drove an hour to a Verizon store to get one. Did not help. The guy at the Verizon store said if that doesn't help, it's likely the jetpack. Verizon said a new one would be $150 and that there's no guarantee that would fix the issue.

But the weird thing is, for the past 5 days, it works fine for 2-3 hours in the morning and then stops working at the same time each day, about 10 am. Why would it do that?? According to Verizon, it's not the plan we're on and we have plenty of gigs left.

If it works for a couple of hours each day at the same time each day, how could it be a hardware issue at our end? We also have a nice brand new laptop. We tried walking around the CG with the jetpack & laptop and there's no difference.

Am at the CG clubhouse at the moment and being "forced" to use the usual substandard CG wifi. :E Help!

[edatlanta]

Two days ago we had a pretty strong thunderstorm passed through here and the Verizon tower that serves my area was right in the middle of it. During the storm passage one of my 3 Jetpacks quit working or should I say slowed way down. I looked at it and it was roaming on 3G and AT&T. All three of my Jetpacks are in the same area about 8-10' apart and the other two were operating normally on Verizon 4G LTE. I rebooted it and even took the battery out and rebooted with no change. It booted back up to AT&T 3G and 1 bar. AT&T does have very poor coverage in this area, but why did this one Jetpack switch to AT&T?

I went into the configuration settings and looked at the network options and sure enough it was set to AT&T. I changed it to Verizon and now it is working normally again.

On another note I have an Amazon Fire Stick. The first time I used it after the Jetpack issue I noted the captioning was in Russian. I had to change that back to English.

Electronics? Go Figure!

[Neil_Citro]

If you are on a prepaid plan, they are subject to deprioritization. This means that all the other Verizon customers in the area go ahead of you. That said I would think it should work, just be extremely slow. When you say it "Does not work" what does that mean? Are you failing to connect, does the display (or status page) show now service, or are you just not getting any internet? Try a speed test when it is "not working" and see if you get anything at all. If so that would suggest everything is working, you are just depriortized. If your phones are Verizon post paid and working correctly, that would rule out any kind of tower issue and again lean towards depriortization being the issue.

[jcpainter]

1. By "pay as you go", do you mean a pre-paid plan? All pre-paid plans are deprioritized behind post-paid plans.

2. You never have identified the model of your new hotspot. Look at your online account and it will tell you if you can't tell from your sales receipt.

3. Have you gone to the online diagnostic page and compared your signals when it's good and when it's bad like wa8yxm recommended?

If you will give specific answers to these questions, some of us may be able to help you more.

[JiminDenver]

I hope that it is working for you now.if not it could be your plan. You said that you were on a pay as you go plan? Often those plans do not come with all the bells and whistles of a post paid plan. One of those is priority on the tower. Traffic increases from mid morning on and prepaid subscribers get taken care of before you. I use to see it when I had both a Cricket phone and a post paid AT&T account.

Part of it can be just using Verizon. Big red has the biggest footprint and twice as many users as AT&T. They may have not updated the tower/s since the local number of users grew and it becomes overloaded. You can see this in dramatic fashion during the big tent even in Quartzsite. I still have all four carriers and only AT&T stayed strong the three years that I have been there.

[rk911]

with each update it sounds more and more like a tower issue.

[myredracer]

Just updating...

It starting working mid-day yesterday and has been working non-stop since. No idea why but maybe Verizon did actually fix it? I guess we'll see over the next few days.

[2oldman]

Verizon is showing a good-faith effort, but likely they have no clue either.

[wa8yxm]

Again I will say as others have it may be a signal issue. Log into the device's diagnostic page and pull up the signal meter

And the tower gets busier during the day as well.

[Bill_Satellite]

I would take it to the Verizon store during the period that it is not working and make sure they can get the problem resolved.

[myredracer]

OMG. It started working again just before 9 pm. This now seems to be a pattern. We are connected to the jetpack on 3 devices but we lose connection to the internet in the morning around 10 am and then it comes back in the evening. Has been the same for going on a week.

It's as if other users are on the internet during the day and we get bumped to the bottom of the access list. Is this even possible? The CG office told us today they've been having problems with their wifi which is provided by Wave. Could this be related?? They did say though that Verizon has been the best service at this location.

We tried the jetpack in a town about 20 miles away and it didn't work.

Not sure why Verizon can't figure this out.

[wa8yxm]

YOu will need to try the jet pack in another area.. Sounds to me like a tower issue but it is possible you are on what I call the "Ragged edge" (Can you check the signal strength of the tower with the jetpack.. I do not know)

IF you are on the edge then the sun is your enemy and there is nothing to be done. Save wait till dark or at least late evening.

If it's a tower problem trying the jet pack in a different area (Different tower) will be of great help.

[jcpainter]

No . . . see the models here: Verizon hot spots


Did you have a chance to watch the comparison video that showed the tremendous difference in performance between the various Verizon hotspots?

[myredracer]

Well, I spoke too soon. Our internet connection just went dark again. This time at 11:29 am. What we did notice this time is that it started to really slow down before it stopped. Time to throw in the towel and give up it seems.

Could it be our particular plan and other users that are logging in and we're getting bumped??

jcpainter wrote:

myredracer wrote:
Called Verizon yesterday morning and finally got to talk to an actual tech guy that knew more than the previous people we talked to. He said he had another customer with the exact same issue and it was resolved by replacing their jetpack. This tech said Best Buy had the jetpack for $40 instead of $150 at a Verizon store so off we went into Gresham again to get one. The new jetpack worked okay at Best Buy.

Hope they sold you one of the newer models. Which one did you get?

Not certain, would it be a BBF9?

[jcpainter]

myredracer wrote:
Finally working, woohoo!! 🙂

Called Verizon yesterday morning and finally got to talk to an actual tech guy that knew more than the previous people we talked to. He said he had another customer with the exact same issue and it was resolved by replacing their jetpack. This tech said Best Buy had the jetpack for $40 instead of $150 at a Verizon store so off we went into Gresham again to get one. The new jetpack worked okay at Best Buy.

Got back to the CG and it would not work. Another call to Verizon and they got it going. That only lasted minutes. Then another call to Verizon and they rechecked the IME no. and SIM card and did some kind of reset. That worked another 15 minutes or so. We figured we were SOL at that point.

Then around 11 pm, it suddenly started working out of the blue and has been fine since. Keeping our fingers crossed...

Never was a cell tower issue according to Verizon. Never did get any solid clues from them. They did add 15 gigs to our plan for all our pain and suffering.

Hope they sold you one of the newer models. Which one did you get?