Signal has gotten progressively worse

Question

I have been with Verizon a little over a year now and from what I can say, the signal inside of my house has gotten worse since last year. When I signed up I had steady 4G LTE signal indoors. Now it's a guessing game with every kind of signal. Every time I go to pull my phone out of my pocket I am more likely to have 1x or 3G or no data and no bars. The signal switches so much that its sometimes hard to use basic data functionality or even send a text message because the phone is switching between data services.
Several times a day I am greeted with no data. There are some days when I have absolutely nothing for a good 10 minutes. By nothing I mean no data and no signal bars. Text messages and phone calls cannot happen in those 10 minutes. I have had people calling me and saying my phone went straight to voice mail or said it was ringing and I didn't pick up. Problem is, I never heard the phone ringing nor did I see the phone change over to the incoming call screen when I had it out on the table. The same goes for sending text messages. The sending icon (green arrow) stays on for a long time and then it's finally sent or it never gets sent because of the phone switching between data services.
The lack of the phone ringing or text messages being sent has cost me money. I run a package store with my family and have to place weekly orders with sales reps and when they say they called and my phone never rang there is a problem. The same goes for texts since some never got sent I couldn't text the order. It's quite a cut throat business in the sense that if I don't have product then the customers will just walk out and go up or down the street and that makes my business look bad and that affects income to pay our bills like my phone bill from Verizon. My apartment is in the same building as the business so even there I have seen the signal become worse.
My phones are 4 DROID RAZRs and they all have troubles with signal. As a result of poor signal the Internet is barely usable and the phones are questionably reliable to make calls and send texts. The battery life is also horrible, I have to charge my phone twice a day because somehow I lose 10% battery life in a half hour even though I sometimes don't use the phone during that span of time. The same goes for the other phones. My younger brother's phone gets so hot to the touch that it slows down significantly and he has to set it down for a good half hour. My parents also have the same problems with heat. Since they have become more relaxed any my brother and I have become more active in the business they use their phones for other things. My dad uses pandora and complains that it cuts out because the phone was switching between data services. My mother watches youtube videos and says they always take forever to load. They also spend lots of time calling their family members and they complain of their phones getting too hot and the batteries dying too quickly. We have wifi but it is only usable within the immediate range of the router (the back office) not where we need it.
We have spent hours on the phone with Verizon only to become more frustrated. We have tried device swaps because of the signal and charging port issues on our phones. We have also gone through several SIM card changes. Sometimes I'll even pick up a phone off contract from best buy to test the signal strength with a newer device. We've done everything from factory data resets to running safe mode. Nothing improves reception. The only sure fire way to improve reception is to not touch the phone and set it down on a table because when it's picked up the signal drops from 4 bars to 1 bar. Even idle it will switch services and we have all had the phone hot sitting in our pockets and having 1x or no data and no bars. It would have been nice to consider getting my family new phones in October of this year but I guess Verizon decided to change their upgrade policy so now I have to wait until March 2014 but I don't think our phones will last that long.
I never had this problem before with Verizon but now it's a part of every day life meanwhile I have to foot the bill. Why has my signal gotten worse? It used to work fine and have excellent reliability now Verizon is becoming like AT&T in my store which flat out does not work because there is no service inside. I don't know what to do in this case because we can barely use our phones. Our usage has gone down across the board especially data since the signal type switches with a mind of its own.

Answer 1

I came here to search for answers to the same problem.
Although I have iTunes on a Mac the symptoms are similar.
Everything video played perfectly in iTunes before the last round(s) of iTunes updates. Now I have problems with jerky playback.
I installed more RAM as the program is now so cumbersome it struggles without it. This helped the sluggishness of iTunes but not the video playback.
They play perfectly in the Quicktime Player program itself, so the problem lies within iTunes and an answer needs to be found.