guitaaron's Posts

After doing some research I'm hypothesizing there are two things going on: 1.  Verizon sold off all their towers earlier this year in a huge $10 Billion deal.  I'm sure no one's going to admit that's a factor, but seems like an awfully big coincidence. 2. They just rolled out VoLTE 1.0.  If you've ever bought something from Apple, you know to never use version 1.0 of anything.  It did provide really awesome call quality when I tried it, but then calls kept dropping so I had to remove it.  Also, it's "supposed to" transition from 4G to 3G seamlessly, but that doesn't actually happen. In my case, I figured out the "Advanced Calling Features" of VoLTE were the root cause.  However, even after fixing that I've noticed more dead spots then we had before. And as for these "marginal/variable" coverage areas.  Let's throw a number on it - What does that mean exactly, as in dB signal loss?  Why aren't any of these areas depicted on the coverage maps on the Verizon webpage or in stores?  All I see is my entire local area colored red.  Seems a bit misleading to me.

Hi everyone, I thought I'd post a quick update following up on my original post.  I went through the entire Verizon process, from every possible iteration of resetting and rebooting to finally replacing the phone, and that did not fix it.  To recap, here were the symptoms: -- Sporatic dropped calls.  Also, every so often I'd get a message that "all circuits are busy" which never happened before. -- Weak indicated signal strength overall, and random LTE dropouts, and increased battery usage because the phone detects a weak signal. -- Bad data connectivity, as in LTE indicated on the phone but apps saying they can't connect to the network. The default fix in the Verizon stores is to reset network settings (which fixes it long enough to get you out of the store), or sell a network extender, or both. Long story short, here's what finally fixed it (I think).  On your Verizon account home page, go to "Devices" then "Plans and Services" and disable "Advanced Calling Features."  This removes the VoLTE service from your account.  After I got the alert window on my phone that Verizon removed the service my signal strength (in field test mode) jumped 10db. I want to point out that this is NOT the same thing as going to your settings and setting LTE to "Data Only".  You've got to go through the web page and remove the service itself. I suspect that VoLTE being a new service means there are some bugs that aren't quite hammered out yet.  Just wish they'd have told me that to start out with instead of wasting time figuring it out for myself... I'll keep an eye on it over the next few days and post if I turn out to be wrong.  Or maybe one of you smart guys can chime in and tell me why I'm wrong.  Either way removing VoLTE seems to have made performance go back to what it was before they rolled the service out.  Which, in hindsight, kinda makes sense. Hope this helps. Aaron

It started happening with the carrier settings update that was around the same time as the iOS 8.3 software update.  Before that it was working fine.  I thought it was my phone but 2 or 3 other people I know on Verizon have made the same comment.  It's happening for 3G, 4G, everything it seems.  Just seems like everything got weaker in the last month or so.  I've already tried "reset network settings," "reset all", etc. all the normal steps.