I ended up contacting Samsung's customer support. It took a while and once I got to talk to someone they tried to walk me through all the steps I already tried. Finally(!!!) they suggested a factory reset. I was a bit dubious but that *did* fix th...
tried removing sim card again and hard restart by holding volume down and power button. sim card status says: "Mobile network state: Connecting" and data network type LTE.
has worked for years. same phone. data shows as active in my account. more than 2GB on it. stopped working last week. not sure exactly when since i dont use it all the time.
thanks for the advice guys. plenty of data on my account. text and voice works. data seems to have stopped working recently. i dont use it every day so im not sure exactly when and im on the road without another phone...