When I switched from AT&T from Verizon and swapped my aging, battered, and bruised Nexus One for a DROID BIONIC, the possibility of buyer’s remorse was not on my mind. I was coming from AT&T - America’s single least reliable network in terms of dropped calls. So, I thought the last thing I’d end up doing was wishing I was back there. And now, at least part of me does.

If you own a Verizon 4G LTE handset, you’ve probably experienced an issue exactly or approximately like this one: You put your phone in your pocket or let it sit overnight, take it out some time later or the next morning, and there’s no data connection. It won’t acquire a connection, and the only solution (most often) is to power down the phone and reboot.

The problem tends to occur whenever a Verizon LTE device is switching from one connection type to another. WiFi to 3G, 4G to 3G, no connection to 3G - you get the idea. Typically, it happens when the phone tries to get back on the CDMA 3G network from anywhere else (though I have observed my BIONIC having a hard time getting a 4G connection, too).

The connection dropping happened to me multiple times every single day for two weeks when I was reviewing the Samsung DROID Charge, and happens at least once a day (sometimes multiple times a day) on my DROID BIONIC. Artem and many others have experienced the same problem on the HTC Thunderbolt, and a quick Googling reveals that it also afflicts owners of the LG Revolution. Here's a few randomly selected VZW Support threads on the issue:

This leads to one, inescapable conclusion. The problem isn’t the individual phones, it’s the one feature they all share: LTE. Now, just why all of Verizon’s 4G phones seem to have these issues is anyone’s guess. It could be hardware if all the phones share the same LTE chip (thought it could be that chip’s firmware, too). It could be network-side. It could be gremlins. We don’t know. We don’t know because Verizon hasn’t given anyone an answer.

As far as we know, Verizon hasn’t even publicly acknowledged this problem exists. Some BIONIC owners experiencing the issue are actually being swapped new phones if the connection problems are particularly bad (this is probably a customer retention placebo). Some are being told an OTA update is “coming in November.” So Verizon does know the problem is real. Will an update fix it? I'm very skeptical, and for good reason.

After numerous software updates, the problem still afflicts the Charge and Thunderbolt. The BIONIC was released with this problem nearly half a year after the Thunderbolt hit store shelves. If it was a simple “glitch,” something tells me Motorola would have folded in a fix at some point during the BIONIC’s development, or that HTC or Samsung would have figured it out by now. It’s clearly a larger issue.

So, what is it, Verizon? Do first generation LTE chips just suck that bad? Is switching between CDMA and the GSM-based LTE connection proving an insurmountable task on the network side? Because right now, I feel like a beta tester, except I’m not using a beta product. I got this phone not only for the phone itself, but for the network it operates on. And right now, that network is proving to be the biggest problem I have with an otherwise enjoyable device.

Switching the phone to CDMA-only mode doesn’t fix the problem, either, and I think that telling customers who bought the phone for its 4G capabilities to do this is insulting and a cop-out of the highest order. Verizon reps are also telling customers to switch the phone in and out of Airplane mode (this sometimes remedies the problem for me), or simply to yank the battery and power the phone back up. Great solutions, guys - maybe you should write a white paper.

It's also worth noting that the problem seems to occur much less frequently for users who rarely leave 4G coverage areas - which is fine and dandy for those few who almost never go without LTE signal, but not the rest of us.

I hate to drag out the “I’m a customer and I pay for your service” banner and wave it around like some consumer advocate, but at this point the problems with Verizon’s 4G devices, and Verizon's silence on them, are bordering on absurdity.

Verizon is giving Android, its handset partners, and LTE technology a bad name by pretending this is some isolated issue affecting a few rogue handsets. It's not. Speak up, Verizon - your subscribers deserve better than this.