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Lesson of the day: Don't buy "refurbished" routers off eBay.
When we signed up for our internet I wanted to try and save a few bucks by getting a used Netgear Nighthawk off eBay and just sticking in the provider's SIM card.
This was a mistake.
The return period for the router was 30 days. Everything was going great until 46 days later when we suddenly couldn't connect to the internet. In place of the 4gLTE that's normally displayed, there was a capital letter "E". When I rebooted it, it said that our Broadband was disconnected. It turns out that this means that the device is blacklisted by AT&T and the SIM card is banned.
When I tried to unlock the router via AT&T website using the IMEI number, it said that the service was canceled within the 14 day period and could not be unlocked. We're guessing that the owner canceled the service and then failed to return the router and then never paid for it. Basically, the router is "hot".
I contacted the seller, WEST_212 for resolution. I explained our situation. He was willing to do a one time courtesy by allowing us to return it for replacement as long as we paid for shipping. We will do that, although we still feel this isn't fair (why it took AT&T this long to figure out we were using a "hot" router is not something we have no control over).
Meanwhile, I reached out to our provider to confirm that our SIM card was still good. It is. Whew. What a load off my mind.
Tomorrow we will head into town to return the router. Meanwhile, the old Verizon Ellipsis JetPack is our main source for internet. As usual, the signal isn't great, but it's getting us by. We just can't upload videos to Youtube. To feed my MMOFPS addiction, I fired up the 20 year old game "Delta Force 2" by Novalogic. Afterall, it was made for 14400 baud modems which was dabomb back in the day. I"m happy with that until the replacement router shows up.
