@standupmobile interesting that you point all of that out.
On OTA16, I forced 3G because I was having issues with 4G...and at that time I had no major issues with consistent SMS. Now I am on solid 4G running OTA17...and can only send....not receive SMS.
As for push notifications...it is odd that you found you had better luck with push notifications on 3G, but not on 4G or even wifi. If I wasnt using my pixel 3a as my DD, and didnt want to risk mucking up my APN and losing 4G...I would totally force 3G to see if push notifications work.
I have been looking through the repos as of late...but have had no major findings that could cause the connectivity check to fail on 4G & wifi, but not 3G.
I did notice the move from TLSv1 to TLS1_2 in this commit, but the connectivity check endpoint is http, not https...so wouldnt think it would matter.
https://gitlab.com/ubports/core/lomiri-push-service/-/commit/7d7f8c2ef4283526587eb496c9964185f46e2f7c