Verizon Wireless quirks

Since I didn't wish to ever have to deal with AT&T, I decided to leave T-Mobile and move over to Verizon.  I found a nice Android phone that was available for a decent price and ordered it.  It arrived on time, my phone number was moved from T-Mobile to Verizon and life appeared to be just ducky.

When Verizon turned on 4G/LTE service in my area, I was looking forward to experiencing the 10 times performance improvement that their advertisements seemed to promise.  The very best I've seen has been a download speed of 4.83 Mbps and an upload speed of 1.27 Mbps as measured by speedtest.net. T-mobile's 3G service usually offered 0.8 Mbps download and .3 Mbps upload.  While this is a nice improvement, it is nothing even remotely close to the promises.

I've been noticing another problem and just was informed by a perky Verizon Wireless technical support agent that this is inherent in how Verizon's wireless network works. Here's the scenario that demonstrates the problem. I'll call a friend and end up in that friend's voicemail box. The friend will immediately call me back.  I'll accept the call, tell them that I'll be right back and switch to the other call.  When I press the end call button, expecting the call to voicemail to be disconnected and me being returned to the call with my friend, both calls are disconnected. The manual for the phone appears to indicate that the behavior I'm expecting was what the phone manufacturer expected to happen, that is that the voicemail call would be ended and I would be returned to the other call.  I guess that Verizon hopes that people will keep both calls going and burn up their minutes much more quickly than expected.

As I learn more quirks about Verizon Wireless, I'll comment on them here.