Re: How to get back to previous version and radios
Thanks to everyone for the replies. I really want to get into rooting and doing my own thing on these devices. I just like tinkering with them. This week I won't have time due to being on the road. Anyway, I wanted to update everyone on what I found out yesterday from Verizon, and some things they did to my phone at the store that improved reception ALMOST back to where it was.
We went to the VZW store as my son's Droid Charge is crapping out and we got him the S4. Great phone......I don't see much advantage to it from the S3, but from the Charge it is a big jump. Anyway, back to the S3. For the first time the person who helped knew more than we did. This guy was great. He admitted to rooting his own VZW phone. He knew about the S3 issue and told me there are VZW internal tech forums only employees have access to and he said the radio in this update came flawed from Samsung. They know it and a fix will be coming (who knows when though?). I normally would dismiss this as we all know the old story of "the Verizon rep told me...." He asked if he could "tweak" my S3 which I handed over to him. He walked me through what he thought would help and explained the changes to me. We went through every app and disabled a ton of them after he told me what they did and that I would not use them.
Then we went to Settings, More Settings, Mobile Networks, Global Data Roaming Access. He turned that setting to "Allow access for all trip." He said this menu is really mislabeled. I told him I am not going out of the country with the phone and he said this also turns on "roaming" to other carrier towers that my phone will connect to if they have a better signal. As long as you are in the US there is no charge for this. He said this is always set this way on his phones. I had already gone through all the other settings in this menu such as setting Network Mode to CDMA/LTE, and made sure LTE-Verizon Internet was checked in Access Point Names.
Just doing this my phone immediately went from 3 bars to 4 bars in the store (other phones on display were already at 4 or 5). So far after a day, this has made a huge difference in my download speeds. After the update I could get 1 or 2 bars in my downstairs den, but the connections would be erratic and time out on the Speed Test. Now I still only get 2 bars down there, but the data is dependable.
Now I don't know how long this will work, and there could be many other reasons I'm getting better and more stable data now. I've seen other posts on here where people thought they found a fix, only after a day or so it was back to the crappy way it was after the update. Try it and let me know if you get improvement.
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