Note 4 randomly drops from 4G to 3G

[John_Cline]

I have a Verizon Note 4 that I got the day they were released. I'm absolutely loving this phone except for one thing; after some random period of time, usually an hour or two, it will drop down from 4G to 3G and the only way to get 4G back is to restart the device. This happens all over town, so it doesn't seem to be localized to the cell tower near my home, I've got plenty of signal strength. I've tried changing the network mode from "Global" to "LTE/CDMA" but that didn't make a difference. This occasionally happened on my previous phone (Galaxy S4) and all I had to do was engage the airplane mode and turn it right off. That trick doesn't work on the Note 4, it requires a device restart. Any ideas?

 

[zeeesss]

Well if u were also getting this issue on ur s4 then there has to be something wrong with the locality of ur house.

Have u tried it somewhere else outside? Like i had a s4 before note 4, it used to drop to 3g or h+ when i used to travel by train and the same thing is with the note 4. Its just the signal problem. U may get a full signal but that won't be enough fr 4g thats y it drops to 3g.

Posted via the Android Central App

 

[Nakrohtap]

I have a Verizon Note 4 that I got the day they were released. I'm absolutely loving this phone except for one thing; after some random period of time, usually an hour or two, it will drop down from 4G to 3G and the only way to get 4G back is to restart the device. This happens all over town, so it doesn't seem to be localized to the cell tower near my home, I've got plenty of signal strength. I've tried changing the network mode from "Global" to "LTE/CDMA" but that didn't make a difference. This occasionally happened on my previous phone (Galaxy S4) and all I had to do was engage the airplane mode and turn it right off. That trick doesn't work on the Note 4, it requires a device restart. Any ideas?

Are you getting no signal warnings at all? This sounds like the Note 3 issue all over again. If your time without signal is 0% and your battery life is not taking a hit, it may not be a big issue. If it is, I would take it back immediately. Every phone won't be perfect. There's bound to be a dud or two out there.

 

[John_Cline]

I have been searching the other forums for anyone reporting a similar issue, I have found a number of references to the Note 4 dropping from 4G to 3G after making a phone call. This is indeed the case with my phone, 4G is fine until I make a call and it drops to 3G until I reboot the phone. I'll call Verizon and see if they have a clue (which they probably don't.)

 

[dpham00]

What dbm(both 4g and 3g) are you getting in the area where it drops from 4g to 3g

Sent from my Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note 4

 

[smoothrunnings]

I have a Verizon Note 4 that I got the day they were released. I'm absolutely loving this phone except for one thing; after some random period of time, usually an hour or two, it will drop down from 4G to 3G and the only way to get 4G back is to restart the device. This happens all over town, so it doesn't seem to be localized to the cell tower near my home, I've got plenty of signal strength. I've tried changing the network mode from "Global" to "LTE/CDMA" but that didn't make a difference. This occasionally happened on my previous phone (Galaxy S4) and all I had to do was engage the airplane mode and turn it right off. That trick doesn't work on the Note 4, it requires a device restart. Any ideas?

Since Verizon doesn't have LTE Advanced yet you'll only be getting 3G when you make calls and LTE when you for your data. This is a limitation in LTE itself. There is one or two white papers on the internet if you search google that explains it in detail.

 

[phillthedrill]

You're not going to get 3G when you make calls.....it can handle 4G LTE on calls as you can find if you use a Bluetooth headset and it stays on 4G. The problem if it's all over town might be the sim card. I've heard of new sim cards going bad, so you might talk to one of the techs at the Verizon store and get them to either test yours or give you another sim to see if that helps. The only other thing is wait for a radio/rom update to fix the problem. They've come out with tons of radio/rom updates for previous phones that help with connectivity, so I'm sure they will with the Note 4 as well.

 

[dpham00]

Since Verizon doesn't have LTE Advanced yet you'll only be getting 3G when you make calls and LTE when you for your data. This is a limitation in LTE itself. There is one or two white papers on the internet if you search google that explains it in detail.

Svlte is supported on most Android phones including the note 4

Sent from my Verizon Samsung Galaxy Note 4

 

[totalchaos08]

I hope someone has an answer for this too or a software update in the future can fix this b/c my Verizon Note 4 does this as well.

 

[nugj]

Funny how undependable all this technology is even today. These things are as nervous as a turkey before Thanksgiving. You can get Comcast IMAP to work...you can't, you can get it to use 4G LTE for phone calls....you can't. You can get it to work sometimes but not other times...on and on. I have as much fun with these things as the next guy, especially since I am a telecom industry guy now semi-retired. But at some point you realize that you are screwing around with almost every functional feature the darned thing has and that is when it is just too much frankly. My biggest complaint about Wireless Telecom even as an industry insider was always that we are still too unreliable to be taken seriously. We develop new unreliable stuff when we still haven't figured out how to make the old unreliable stuff work. As an industry we get away with it because nobody can figure out what the heck we are doing anyway and nobody holds our feet to the fire. People generally know more about how their car works than how a wireless telecom system works much less how it integrates with the backbone.