It is pretty common for Verizon to say they “don’t support” something. In fact, all of the providers do this at one point or another because they want you to buy their stuff, or their front line support folks legitimately are told that these IMEI’s/products aren’t supported.
I’ve been using mine since it came out on Verizon. I think for the first 1-2 weeks it was hard to get it to work for some of us because they legitimately hadn’t ever seen it in the wild, but it was working after that.
If you try to activate a new line of service in a router, as I’ve mentioned before in posts and such, it can be a pain. Some of their systems will stop when you get to the IMEI stage and not allow you to proceed if it is not one of their core devices that they sell.
The way around this is to use a hotspot or other Verizon supported device to do the activation. This is why when I get a new plan through Verizon, I usually get one of their hotspots on whatever promotion they have, and then keep that as a backup, but also a way to activate.
It might sound like a lot of work but it can save you hours on the phone with someone who doesn’t even understand what a mobile router is.
Being supported and being certified are two different things in most cases. Gaining certification means that the device has gone through testing by the provider to ensure that there aren’t any weird interactions on their network, that they can on board the product, and a lot more beyond that. Verizon is usually one of the slowest to certify things, so it’s not surprising that it’s still pending for them.
Verizon may have also chosen to block new activations from the BR1 until it is certified, so my note above about activating a new line on something else would potentially get around that.
Finally, there is always the possibility that the plan you’re trying to use, if it happens to be different than the one I cited above in the original article, could have restrictions too. All providers have done this at some point. T-Mobile did this here Problems with T-Mobile voice+data plans and Peplink CAT18 where they prevented specific plans from using a voice plan to do data-only stuff. They prevented activation for some of us trying to use it, and if they were already activated, prevented the device from actually being able to send data.
It sounds like this is just the activation side of things, which you should be able to get around by using another device - my plan is still working just fine with it.