Can't blame the hardware entirely when it comes to Verizon and the GS3.
I've said it before and I'll say it again... CDMA and LTE was never meant to be paired together. They are two totally different network architectures and getting them to play nice together requires quite a bit of technical voodoo and sometimes that "voodoo" doesn't always work. CDMA requires completely different provisioning hardware from LTE.
So no, I don't blame the device for the issues. I blame Verizon's poor choice to stick with CDMA when they should've gone with GSM years ago when the rest of the world went GSM too.
They are stuck between a rock and a hard place. Keep with CDMA2000 which has no future or try to develop a way to transition to something newer, in this case it's LTE. But, in the process of doing that you have to create a way to transition over. The faster Verizon dumps CDMA2000 the better it will be for everyone on that service.
trparky, very little of this is true.
LTE is the natural upgrade path to CDMA. The 3GPP2 has been working on eHRPD as a bridging technology since 2007, and the 3GPP and 3GPP2 groups announced LTE as the evolution to CDMA networks in early 2009.
Originally UMB (Ultra Mobile Broadband) was being developed by Qualcomm as the CDMA 4G upgrade path inside of the 3GPP2, but that project was canceled in Nov 2008 in favor of LTE (and the provisional success of eHRPD).
eHRPD is the bridging technology that, when LTE-capable devices connect to towers that transmit both CDMA 1X/EV-DO and LTE, sends traffic into the all-IP network LTE core (rather than the MSC-based circuit-switch core). eHRPD is reliable and works just fine; it isn't voodoo. It is the supported standard from the 3GPP and 3GPP2. Basically, Verizon relied on geographically dispersed Mobile Switching Centers prior to LTE. If one MSC went down, all calls/data in a region failed. The LTE network can be setup to dynamically connect to different cores for routing, increasing reliability.
Originally Verizon did not enable that dynamic routing technology on the LTE cores, so they had the same regional failures if a specific routing core pooped. They've since enabled dynamic core routing as they upgrade swaths of the country; LTE downtime should be practically non-existant when they finish with a region. Save, you know, backhaul failure.
And what was Verizon's alternative to going forward with the new LTE equipment and eHRPD overlay? Verizon had 44,xxx towers the last time they publicized a specific number, and more now with subsequent acquisitions. Should they have added a second, completely disparate HSPA network on those 44k+ towers that none of their 100 million existing users devices could connect? And then replace those 100 million user devices with HSPA variants? And then upgrade to LTE anyway? And have users replace devices again? That would be a silly waste of capital expenditures, spectrum, and user goodwill.
The connectivity problems of the Galaxy S3 are divided into two groups: 1) users in LTE fringe areas, cycling back and forth between EV-DO and LTE, and 2) Samsung.
Remember, Samsung phones up and down the product lines had Bluetooth problems, GPS problems, WiFi problems, and cellular network issues. Ugh.
But the Samsung issues have been getting better and better. I'll be picking up a Galaxy S4 on Verizon's launch day, and keeping my fingers crossed that it is as reliable as my other Verizon LTE devices. Otherwise, it will go back. =P And then I'll be waiting again for the next best thing...