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Recently I has to replace my Westell gateway with a new one - Verizon supplied Actiontec. This experience has been terrible. Original problem was that the DNS function within the gateway was broken. Gateway could ping by IP but not by DNS. Even though I tested everything out ahead of time, Verizon insisted in going thorugh meaningless and time wasting (both their and mine) procedures to "identify" the problem. Even though I explicitly said I could ping their gateway and using their gateway diagnostics "prove" beyond any shadow of doubt that the problem was in the gateway (or upstream of it) they insisted on going through they procedures including booting into safe mode. Spent about 1.5 hours of this nonsense before they agreed to replace the gateway. If they had let me do things my way (and incidentally trust their own hardware diagnostics) this could have been done in 5 minutes.
If you can ping the gateway - you can almost gaurantee the PC and network to the gateway is decent (but maybe not perfect). BUt verizon always wants to assume the problem is not theirs.
Got new gateway. Thought I set it up OK (had plenty of exp[erience with old one). No problem - or so I thought. Now after three weeks of continually losing the connection (and the PPOE userid/password info in the gateway) I find out (no thanks to verizon) of the Walled garden/ /verizon/redirect issue and the need to run this special procedure. I guess I will be doing that tonight.
Maybe if I had called them and had them walk me through the procedure they might have included the above - but I doubt it. If a tech support type can read a procedure - it must exist and should be available to users. Also, could find NOTHING on their website about verizon/redirect including a google search (their search is awful).
They did expect me to return the bad Westell unit. Why I have no idea - waste of money. But did not realize this without a reminder phone call from them that they would charge me $100 if I didn't (they had included a UPS return ticket).
The only positive note is that to get to this forum I had to get My Account working. Tried everything before talking to customer support - but nothing worked. And no guidance/instructions on what to do online. Spend about 20 minutes chatting with a customer support type - and the issue was resolved. If only technical support was as good!