AirPort Extreme and Verizon Network Extender.

Any success stories using the Verizon Network Extender? I'm not having much success. I tried setting the VNE up by connecting it to my AirPort Extreme and got blue LED's on power, GPS, and WAN fairly quickly, but the SYS LED was solid red. After an hour with no change I tried connecting the VNE directly to the modem thinking there may have been a conflict between the VNE and the APE. No such luck, in this config both the SYS and WAN LEDs remained red.

I called Verizon Tech support and they had me reconnect the VNE to my APE and once again the SYS LED remained red. I spent several hours on and off the phone with Verizon Tech support running some tests and doing some troubleshooting but didn't get anywhere. The tech finally told me he would need to submit a troubleshooting ticket and that they would get back to me within 24hrs.

My Google search didn't reveal anything concrete either. There were a number of people reporting success using the VNE with APE as well as a number of people reporting problems. The threads were a year or more old and none had any real solutions.

I'd like to here from fellow MR members of their experience with the VNE.

I may be getting somewhere. Verizon had me run some VoIP tests on 8x8.com and it looks like my Quality of Service numbers are not where they need to be. I'm seeing QoS of 55-70, according to Verizon I need at least 80% before the VNE will connect, and that I would need to get in touch with Time Warner to improve my QoS. TW suggested I need to bump my service up to 20 up 2 down from the current 10 up 1 down. I explained to them according to Verizon, and the test on 8x8, my upload and download speeds were fast enough. TW's position is that VoIP requires 2mbps up and that would be the only way to increase my QoS. I told them to go ahead and bump up my service (I can always go back down if it doesn't solve the problem). It takes 24 hours for the speed bump to kick in so I should know soon enough if it solves the problem.

Doesn't look like I'm getting anywhere. Its been 36 hours or so since TW upgraded me to turbo. I'm getting 16-20 Mbps down but only 0.97 Mbps up (Turbo should be near 2 Mbps up). Been on the phone with TW most of the morning. First they told me rebooting my modem would solve the problem, it didn't. Now they say the ticket for my upgrade is still open even though it was scheduled for the 11th. Back on hold while they sort it out.

It took about 6 hours of getting bounced around in Time Warners Byzantine nightmare of tech support but I finally made it through to a tier one tech. The VNE not up yet and my QoS is still below 80% but Kevin did help me to get my upload speed from 0.9 Mbps to 1.8 Mbps. I've got a tech coming out to the house on Monday to physically check the lines, so there is still some hope of seeing QoS improvement. I need to spend some time reading up on QoS and VoIP. As I said earlier on Verizon told me I would need a QoS of 80% or better to get the VNE to connect and the testing info on 8x8.com seems to bear that out. What's got me scratching my head though is that this sub par QoS doesn't seem to have an effect on my TW digital phone line which I'm assuming is VoIP based.

This may clarify why QoS may not be such an issue when using the TW digital phone

While it does use VOIP technology, the calls are routed over Time Warner's private IP network versus going over the regular internet like with Vonage.

Click to expand...

Time Warner was out to the house to check the lines and according to them everything is working properly on their end. I called Verizon again, we ran through a bit of troubleshooting but didn't get anywhere. They had me pack the VNE for return. There shipping me out a new one tonight, should have it by Wednesday.