[Verizon Samsung Galaxy S III] DerelictMan:
Sorry if this has been mentioned before. I did extensive searching without finding anything before posting.

I have been having some very strange data connection issues with my Verizon S3 running BoneStock v3.3 (awesome rom BTW, much thanks to andybones and all contributers) over the past few days. Starting a few days back, my signal strength and transfer rates while at work were much lower than normal. While investigating this, I found myself exploring the settings menus (About Phone > Status and More settings > Mobile Networks) to investigate the signal strength more often than normal (and I believe it had been the first time I had ever been to the "Mobile Networks" view).

This morning, I noticed that I had a 3g connection only at my house (this is unusual as I normally have a very strong 4g connection at home and a pretty decent one at work). Toggling in and out of airplane mode, or rebooting the phone would result in a 4g connection for about 1-2 minutes or so before it would again drop back to 3g. Using the Speedtest app, I would get about 0.5Mbps or so down, and the upstream test would not even finish before showing "Network Communication Issues" and dropping back to 3g. Additionally, my phone has been running really hot and the battery has been draining much faster than usual. Meanwhile, I had ruled out a regional network issue by testing my wife's iPhone 5, which was maintaining a solid 4g connection while mine was dropping.

While Googling for this issue, I ran across lots of articles/discussions referencing the bad OTA update Verizon sent out back in June. It struck me how perfectly the typical list of symptoms for that update matched what I was seeing. However I couldn't see why my phone would be having such similar issues, as I never received that OTA update before flashing BoneStock, and have had weeks on BoneStock with no problems at all.

Just for kicks, I switched the "More settings > Mobile Networks > Network Mode" to "Global", then switched it back to "CDMA/LTE/EVDO", then rebooted the device, and this has apparently fixed my issue! :confused:

To be absolutely clear... the current setting for "Network Mode" was already set to "CDMA/LTE/EVDO" when I checked the setting. I merely switched it, then switched it back. That was 2 hours ago, and my connection has been solid as a rock since then and the phone temperature and battery life has gone back to normal.

Doing more research, I saw that apparently the bad Verizon OTA update configured "Network Mode" to "Global" by default, and that many had fixed their connection issues by switching this to "CDMA/LTE/EVDO". Sounds very similar to my problem, except my UI was not showing that it was currently set to Global.

So, hooray that it's working, but I'm not sure what I did or how it was broken in the first place. My working theory is that the phone's Network Mode was actually set to Global somehow through some other mechanism but the UI was not displaying the setting properly, and by switching it and switching it back I overwrote that setting.

Does this ring a bell for anyone? I'd love to figure out what exactly happened, and hopefully prevent someone else from going through the hair pulling that I went through. Thanks in advance!