Who I have the same questioned this topic

I just recently moved to Seattle a few weeks ago, and maybe I was spoiled by Verizon LTE in California, but here in Seattle it is utter garbage everywhere I have been.  I have opened tickets with Verizon about the poor service, and despite promises that someone "will call me back by the following day", I have yet to receive any calls back.

To give you an idea of what is happening, I have 4 out of 5 bars on my Note 2 at home for LTE.  Nearly every attempt by an app that requires data results in a time out.  The Speedtest app will occasionally complete, but about 4 out of five tests fail just trying to complete the ping.  If it does finish, the speeds have ranged from 409 bps to 109 kbps.  Yes, that 409 bps figure is correct.  The upload has failed every time but once and shows 0 kbps.  These speeds are so slow that nearly every webpage will time out and hardly any apps work.  I had to cache my area on Google Maps just to be able to see where I was going because the data connection could not load any maps.

Also, every test above was done with 3-5 bars of signal on LTE, so I am at a loss as to why it is performing so poorly.  My prior phone had an option to turn off the LTE, but this phone does not and none of the apps in the play store have worked to turn it off either.  Because of that, I do not know how data would perform on 3G.  I have tried restarting the phone, wiping the phone, etc.  Nothing has helped at all.  Until today, I believed it was just my phone, but I met with a friend in downtown Seattle today who also has Verizon.  He also could not get anything to load with a full signal on LTE.

So, what am I supposed to do?  If this cannot be resolved, I will have to change carriers and purchase a new phone, but that is a fiasco that I do not want to go through.  Please help!