[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III] hitman_dreams:
Piss-off Verizon!

So I am having the same issue on mine and my wife's phone. Both pre-ordered in June and received on the 9th.

I stream music in my car while I drive to and from work an hour away. This is extremely annoying as I have to constantly fiddle with my phone to get the data connection back while I'm driving to get my music back.

I called Verizon twice and had the SIM swapped out on mine to test if it fixed it. It fixed one issue of signal strength, but not the dropping of connections. Here's my problems:

- Going from a 3G to a 4G area, signal drops out to unknown in the About Phone > Status page for about 30 seconds or more

- Sometimes it just stays at 3G and never switches

- Going from a 4G to a 3G area, signal drops out to unknown in the About Phone > Status page for about 30 seconds or more

- While it claims I have 4G, there are many times where I cannot get any data connection at all where Facebook says network connection error or speed test doesn't work at all and web pages won't load

- One issue fixed after the SIM swap was that under Settings > More Settings > Mobile Networks > Access Point Names it is now switching from EHRPD and LTE more often. Still not perfect, but I'm assuming that it stays in EHRPD mode when in an extended 4G coverage area (not sure about this) but before it wouldn't use the LTE option no matter what

Before the SIM swap my data connection dropped out completely in the middle of a city known to have great 4G coverage and would not come back no matter what I did (airplane mode on/off, mobile data off/on, phone reboot)

Software reset didn't fix any of these issues either.

Here is what I've decided about some of the issues they are having based on my experiences driving around so much. It seems as if the phone cannot negotiate with the towers correctly. It's as if it needs to drop the 3G connection before it can negotiate a 4G connection, hence the 30 seconds of no data at all, and same for going from 4G to 3G, it seems it can't negotiate without first dropping your current connection. 3G to 1X and back has no issues.

I know this is long, but I want it detailed as much as possible. I had gotten the Bionic when it first came out and it did the same thing, where I could never get a 4G connection when it was supposed to or go back once acquired. The main difference is that my Galaxy S III has WAY better battery life than the Bionic had. So they seemed to have cured the battery drain when searching for a 4G tower. I'm still pissed at Verizon stating I'm in a 4G area and then never getting that connection at home, let alone barely getting a 1x connection. My dBm levels are usually in the -95 to -104 area when at home...I'm in a 4G area now and it's at -112 with an asu of 28 while at home it's usually 1 asu. Hope this helps someone else out. I don't know if a phone swap is going to fix these issues.

Verizon has told me that they are looking at a software update sometime in September...I'll believe it when I see it. In the mean time I have 7 more days to decide to keep the phone with no Verizon tech knowing what they are doing or able to troubleshoot their way out of a brown paper bag.