Home Network Chaos

So you want use your own network equipment over ISP provided? 

After years of battling this with multiple ISPs, I finally just used the ISP provided equipment. And in my 800 sq/ft apartment, using their mesh system I get nearly the full data pipe available to me over WiFi. The trick to not being continuously frustrated is to keep the ISP provided gear on default SSID name and password, that way, if there's a network reset of some kind, you won't have to reconfigure all your devices ✅

If you plug your own router "down the chain" below their supplied router, the speed will almost certainly be gated. 

If you remove their router from the chain and replace with yours, the speed will almost certainly be gated (Verizon 5G Home) or the internet might drop regularly (Optimum Cable).

One could call the ISP and ask them to set it up so it's not looking specifically for the MAC address of the supplied router. Calling up Optimum (cable) and doing this is pretty simple. Once they set this configuration, it worked like a charm. 

Verizon is a lot harder as their support won't... support third party network gear. I've spent a lot of time in their router's web portal(s) with all kinds of configurations and the best option was to find the MAC address of their router and clone it (or copy and paste it) to your own router. Now that we know this – such an obvious thing to do! But this didn't continue to work after a 5G system bork and I gave up. That said, it did work well for a time! 

Obviously : 

Proceed at your own risk!

• Find the MAC addresses for both devices and write them down somewhere. 
• Unplug the ISP router and remove it from the chain. 
• Disconnect your router from the chain, but keep it connected to power.
• From a computer, connect to the router directly via wire and navigate to the admin panel (usually 192.168.1.0 or similar).
• Apply the MAC address from the supplied router to your own router.  
• Remove power from the ISP Receiver/Modem. 
• Restart your router.
• Power up the ISP Receiver/Modem.
• Wait for it to power up. 
• Connect the network cable from the ISP Receiver/Modem to your router
• Congratulations!!!!

Home 5G ISP Borked

7 days of completely borked internet. 63 % uptime. YIKES! 

For posterity, and anyone else facing multiple days of Verizon home 5g outages.

Equipment : I am using the Verizon router CR1000A and a CE1000A extender on top of the gateway. I used to use my own router on top of the gateway, but it had tons of problems and Verizon wouldn't officially support it. The speeds I'm getting with the Verizon supplied devices is surprisingly superior (1200 down on wifi? Siccccck).

- Call 611 to see if your tower is effected. https://www.verizon.com/support/check-network-status/ doesn't have detail to tell you if it's your tower or your general area. If your tower is good, but the general area is messed up it will still read as messed up. This is probably the most frustrating aspect of this for me. The website, the chat support, and the AI support all pointed to this status page and they were all like "sorry it's broken, they're working on it, it should be fixed in 2 days." That was fundamentally false. The network status page is sort of like the weather forecast. It could report that it's heavily raining and you look out of the window and the skies are blue. I digress. Next:

- If your tower is clear, and your connectivity is sporadic or inconsistent, like this: https://www.reddit.com/r/verizon/comments/1vol2xs/day_6_of_verizon_home_wifi_down_in_brooklyn/ then your system is having trouble re-setting properly.

- Restarting your devices, including the receiver/gateway won't fix it, but here's what will:

1. Unplug any extender(s).

2. Factory reset (paperclip trick) your router. Side Effect: This will reset your router to Vanilla settings. I stopped doing custom names for my gear years ago because of this. As long as you are using the original name and password for the device, the factory reset won't bork all of your devices. This was a pleasant surprise.

3. Wait until the status lights return to indicate the router is back online.

4. Try to connect via WiFi - it might show up as available, and you might not be able to connect to it even with the default password. If you can connect via WiFi, fantastic. If you can't: plug in an ethernet cable.

5. Once you are successfully connected to the router, internet may still not work. Go to the web portal of your router. For Verizon, this is typically 192.168.1.1 The admin password for this is on your device. Most web browsers will throw a warning and say this website isn't safe. In this very specific scenario, you can go ahead and proceed anyway.

6. The web portal will ask you a few configuration questions. Like enabling IoT, WiFi 6 etc. Turn the stuff on that you want on.

7. Wait a minute or two and watch the system status in the web portal.

8. The device may now show as "connected" instead of offline. Nice!! Even though it says "connected" it might still be offline. Go to some websites or run some pings or speedtests. Fixed? Great. No dice?

9. Unplug just your gateway. Wait a minute. Plug it back in. Wait ~10 minutes.

10. Go to some websites or run some pings or speedtests. Success!!!!

11. Plug in your Extender(s). If you never changed the device name and password, everything will reconnect. I didn't expect this to work and I was very thankful that I didn't have to reconfigure all the convoluted network devices in my apartment.

FWIW on step 4 Verizon offered to send me new equipment, which probably would've worked, but I didn't want to go through the hassle of a return so I tried a few more things. TBH the Verizon person was learning as we were fixing the thing, but they were really great. I mean that seriously. I should've called earlier. WHOOPS. There were tests and things they were running.

GOOD LUCK !