** UPDATE **
So after a total of 4 phones for me and 5 for my wife we FINALLY got phones that hold calls/signal. Sadly my wife dropped hers last week and shattered the screen. Got an Assurion replacement, and it is back to dropping calls. So I called VZW and got knee deep with a technical support rep who didn't like me because I am pretty sure I was talking over her head when I was talking about radios and CDMA. ANYWAYS, we once again got an offer to have her phone replaced free of charge or change to any comperable (how it was said at first) device. Wanting to play the game, I said that i felt that the iPhone5 was a comparable device...tech rep backpeddled and said that she couldn't do that because they were different operating systems and they were not compatable. Well, World War 3 started and there were some comments made about her inteligence level not knowing the difference between comparable and compatable, ect. Long story short, 2 supervisors later progress was made.
We have 5 lines (my parents and my neice as well as us). They sent iPhone4s to my parents lines free of charge, extended their contracts 2 years from that date (they are on the cycle with us, so only like 4 monts extended) and had customer loyality take care of the upgrade fees. By doing that it saved/perserved our grandfathered unlimited plans with our S3.
*NOW HERE IS WHERE IT GETS INTERESTING* I kept my S3 and the wife is trying the iPhone4. She HATES the phone, misses her S3 greatly....but the reception/calling is 100x better. It is back to where we were with our prior phones (She had a Galaxy S Facinate and I had a origional Droid Incredible). Where she used to have no reception she now has 3 bars (parking garage), where she dropped a call 10 times in a 15min drive to work she keeps the call the whole time. With the S3 we have the sim cards and the 4g LTE service, the iPhone4 is only 3G....could this be our issue? Is the sim card/4G possibly messing with our voice service and causing the call dropping and the lowered voice reception?