If I'm right next to a tower of course it works well. I get great reception all day at work. The point is the reception on this phone is garbage compared to other phones and it does not work at my home location which just happens to be pretty important to me since I rely on it heavily for my work. I've replaced SIMS and gotten a replacement already with the same exact results. The phone fails to hold a signal in areas where other phones do, which frankly is embarrassing. My home is within a 4G LTE area and I don't get signal most of the time! I held out in hopes that just maybe (big time long shot) the 4.4.2 update would resolve the issue but it did not. I've finally had enough. As you can see by reading through this thread and the myriad of others, the solutions (or blatant lack there of) that Verizon is throwing out there are useless and unacceptable (New Sim, replacement Note 3's, Hard reset, ect.).
As of Tuesday I picked up a Galaxy S5 just to try out and do a case study to see if it performed better than my Note 3 reception wise, in my house, where my wife's Note 2 seems to do fine. Guess what!? It works much better than the Note 3. I can actually make calls and send/receive text messages. It doesn't show no signal ever, where the Note 3 would frequently show no signal or prompt "Mobile Network Not Available" when trying to make a call.
I don't particularly want a Galaxy S5 but may be forced to make the switch just to have a working phone that functions as intended and as was paid for! The issue here is I paid a lot of money for the Note 3 which Samsung and Verizon released and it's an inadequate product which should be subject to a recall for people having reception issues. It is a known issue that the Note 3 reception is inadequate! Don't let any Verizon reps tell you otherwise.
Simple solution for me: Verizon should offer people who have a Note 3 that suffers from chronic reception issues a replacement phone of a Galaxy S5 or one that works. The Note 3 is still a superior phone to the S5 IMO when working properly however it does not for a lot of people. At this point I would be happy to have Verizon replace my Note 3 with an S5 as that would solve my issues. If a real solution is not presented I will be forced to create my own and it likely won't involve Verizon being my provider any longer.
