called me back as promised and unfortunately had to be the bearer of bad news.  I'm very grateful that she followed up on this issue so we all can fully understand what is happening.

Update on the issues in San Jose near 1st Street and Trimble Rd:

A Samsung R&D center where phone development occurs at Orchard Parkway and Plumeria Dr. is flooding the local cell tower with data and the tower is completely oversubscribed during business hours.  Verizon has confirmed this as the root cause at this location and has started the process of getting an additional tower installed.  The ETA for this new cell tower to come online is unknown; ever tried to get a permit from the city, county, and state?  SWAG would be in the ballpark of 1 year, but there are too many variables to commit on that length of time. 

In a nutshell, this issue will remain for at least another year.

Want to feel a bit better?  Be thankful you're not on Sprint.  Only a few of my colleagues are on Sprint and they are getting ping times of 1.4 seconds, 40kbps down, 8kpbs up.  Is Samsung R&D mostly creating issues for CDMA phones?

Colleagues with T-Mobile service on Samsung GS4 devices are getting ping < 100ms, ~3Mbps down, ~1Mbps up at this location.  They typically see 20+Mbps at their residences.  I'm still trying to find some colleagues with AT&T service to test their speeds.  I'll update this thread later if I do find that it's a CDMA vs. GSM issue.

Proactive note for Verizon:

I'd be surprised if Samsung did not move its phone R&D center to the new gigantic campus that it is building at 1st St. and Tasman Rd. in San Jose.  I would strongly recommend that Verizon prepares extra capacity for that location as Cisco has a very substantial employee base there who will be significantly impacted by the Samsung phone R&D group.  (Hint: Thanks to SEO, this thread has the top hit in Google for query "Verizon Silicon Valley" and Cisco employees will know you were warned in advance)

Other Silicon Valley locations with issues I've reported:

has created support tickets for all the locations I've listed in this thread.  Verizon has an internal DB containing locations with known issues in coverage.  Locations I've listed are already in their DB and they are aware of them.  Fix ETA is unknown.

informed me that since I have good service at my home address where my Verizon bill is sent, I am not eligible for having an early termination fee waived.  My work and home are in the same city, but it doesn't matter to Verizon's policies... 

I'm simply waiting for some new Android phones to be released on other carries and I'll be leaving Verizon shortly thereafter.  Their failure to build out an adequate 4G network in the San Francisco Bay Area is quite appalling and I can no longer justify paying a premium for such poor quality of coverage.  The nation's largest carrier is over subscribed in urban areas, future customers should exercise caution.

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