3G drops to one bar accessing internet

[rp2955]

Hi all,

     I posted this in another forum but thought I would post here to see if someone from Verizon might be monitoring and could help us.  We got our Fascinate in December and we have always seemed to have a buggy 3G connection.  A few things going on:  one, we have never seen full signal strength on our phone, ever.  I think the most we have seen is 3 bars.  But more importantly, we have a strange thing happening when trying to access any Internet applications (browser, Facebook, etc).  As soon as we click the icon, the bars drop down to either 1 or none.  I understand that sometimes the strength indicator isn't necessarily always accurate...but half the time our pages are loading slow or not loading at all.  It feels like for whatever reason the signal is indeed dropping as soon as we try to connect.  I have a blackberry through verizon for work and sit it right next to the Fascinate and show full strength where the Fascinate shows maybe a bar or two.  This happened before the 2.2 update and is still happening after the update.

Verizon had us reset the phone a couple of days ago and I have done the *228 a few times.  We still have the issue.  They are sending us a replacement phone.  I thought I had seen postings from others who had issues and were able to get tech support to do something around resetting their "data connection" (whatever that means).

Any ideas what might be causing the drop to one or no signal bars with internet access?  If I am paying $30 for this a month, I should be able to access it whenever I want at decent speeds.

[#2]

Thank you for your inquiry. The signal strength is based on the area you are in and the phone itself. Normally, resetting the data connection won't increase signal. It will help if you are getting no data at all in an area you should. It is not a known issue for the Fascinate to get significantly lower signal or drop bars when going to the internet. In this case it does sound like this is an equipment issue. Are you seeing this issue with the replacement phone?