Extremely slow LTE service in San Francisco

[sekarb]

I have an iPhone 5 with Verizon postpaid contract plan [unfortunately].

The data speeds have been miserable last several months. Most of the time, my download is less than 1mbps and upload will be like 30kbps.

Right now, I am near the city hall area and my speeds are 0.03mbps down and 0.03mbps up. and yesterday was 0.04mpbs down and 0.10mbps up.

I went to the verizon store and it works fast inside since they have repeaters in the store. They said the phone appears to work fine and said it depends on the area..blah..blah..basically they just stopped short of admitting their network sucks in SF.

I'm extremely disappointed with the service considering how much they are charging me for it.

I think Verizon should give a discount or let us terminate the contract without the Early Termination Fee. I would be happy to go back to AT&T. They have much faster speeds here and lower fees.

Anyone else having such slow speeds in SF? Feel free to share it here..

[Daveyo]

My LTE speeds in SF Zip code 94103 are just beyond bad.  Often times data is just non existent.  We have several phones on a family plan so switching is not simple but I'm contemplating anyway because the current situation is intolerable. 

Interestingly, checked LTE vs. 3G on my new iPhone 6 and 3G is a bit faster!

Check out this LTE "speed" test (yes I confirmed I was on LTE)

And here is 3G!!!

[wfitz1964]

I have had three dropped calls poor LTE service in Castro valley.  I'm in the valley of the uninformed . I see att building cell towers like gangbusters. I see verizon has cell site permitted .65 mile from me but nothing is being done.

[melvy]

It's gotten so bad that I stop believing when my phones says I'm on LTE. In most of Castro I will have 3-4 bars and yet can't get any data. Other parts of the city I get 3g like speeds. My phone can't take advantage of their new XLTE spectrum, but the fact still remains Verizon's data is horrible in SF. At&t is looking sweeter every day that passes - not to mention At&t users get reception while going thru sunset and downtown tunnels! Come on Big Red...who cares if you have LTE everywhere if it's crappy where you spend majority of your time.

[wwits]

I am thinking of buying out the rest of my Edge contract and jumping to AT&T, but AT&T currently has a 21 day leadtime on ordering the same model phone I have now.

I have experienced all these same speeds. Most of the day I'm on wifi either at work or at home, but Verizon's data speed is insanely bad in most parts of the city (Cole Valley, Castro, Haight, and Mission).  In the financial district where I work they are decent but not worthy of bragging about - just better than 0.05 Mbps which is what I'm used to on LTE.

Before upgrading to the iPhone 6, I was still using a 4S and 3G speeds were definitely faster than the current LTE speeds in SF.

[mikeluscher159]

Likely area congestion.

Is your area a XLTE city?

iPhone 5's don't have AWS/(Band 4) which is what VZ uses to beef up congested areas.

5C's and up do.

You can either upgrade, or if another carrier is better in your area, jump ship.

[dlowrey99]

i 100% agree.  the marina and lower pac heights are complete dead zones.  riding in a cab/uber from one end of the city to the other results in several periods of no data flow.  reception seems to be fine, but data trickles or stops.  even in the financial district (normally ok) i'm having trouble streaming video right now without pauses every other second.

one would think verizon would put more effort into providing better coverage in the most tech-heavy/savvy city in the nation.

[melvy]

upgrading doesn't seem to help too much. said he has a iPhone 6 (which should take advantage of Verizon's AWS spectrum) and is still not getting the LTE speeds one would expect from Big Red. I didn't want to take the chance, and ended up switching to Ma Bell for the Note 4. I'm paying less and getting better service...go figure.

[rayndrahps]

I downloaded 4G LTE Switch (which was created because another one started having malware or requested a bunch of features, so this one, for now is pretty free of unnecessary items) from the Play store.  Being able to force my phone to 3g is fantastic since I can actually use it again.  The LTE works fine by PacBell Park, but while I have 4-5 bars of signal strength in places like the Castro (from Castro and Market down to Castro and 19th, Hartford over to whatever the street past Collingwood is) loads slowly, and by slow I mean 5 minutes between clicks on stuff and at worst times out entirely.

The other really bad area I've noticed is Church and Dorland Ave up to 20th and Church and over to Valencia.

I re-tested after downloading the app that allows me to force my Droid Maxx (Capable of XLTE so it's not that) and the things I was trying to do on LTE load near instantly on 3g since the data needs of the apps I'm using are miniscule.  I've reported this to Verizon but of course never hear anything back from them.  I'm just chiming in hoping that this and other forum posts get seen and have more and more people echo the ever increasing horror story of LTE on Verizon in San Francisco.  I'm available for an upgrade, as much as I hate AT&T I might have to move over there myself.

I should mention I handle about 40 Verizon lines for my company and most of my users are reporting dead zones like this all over SF as well as all the people I play Ingress with (which is probably the best way to find data outages more than any other application on the phone right now due to being a GPS based video game where you have to go all over the place.  Never thought I'd be using it as a tool for finding out where Verizon's data coverage is crap.)

If anyone wants me to post Speedtest pictures, I can make that happen, but I think if you're here in this thread you're in the same boat already.

[rayndrahps]

Other area's with little to no data:  Market St & Octavia St. down to Duboce Ave. and Elgin Park over to  Laguna St. and Waller St., then also Haight St. and Market St.