In addition to all the people celebrating the holidays by binge watching movies using unlimited data to stream them and busy shopping and contacting friends and families. There is no mystery about the slow down, the cause was some work that Verizon scheduled at a time when many businesses were closed for the holidays so that there was less impact on those business customers who rely on fast internet speeds. This deadline was scheduled and known a couple of years ago. I switched to a new phone earlier this year as my old phone was going to become obsolete this January 1st.
Verizon was making a major change over to new technology in their whole system this last few weeks. So yes you might have seen a slowdown and then suddenly it got better when their list of task on the daily schedule of what happened on what day finally all got completed. The finalization of the new change was scheduled for today, January 1, 2020. You need to know about this change as it involves some devices that may no longer be working properly on the network such as Non HD voice phones. We had just changed to their new model/wifi router then shipped to us and saw how extremely slow the network was this last 10 days even over our business class higher speed network connection at the office space.
Information below from the Verizon website:
"CDMA Network Retirement
As we complete our network transition to 4G and 5G, we at Verizon would like to keep you up to date with some important activities.
We are moving all devices to our HD Voice LTE network, which offers superior coverage and performance compared to previous generation networks. Starting January 1, 2020, Verizon will no longer allow any CDMA (3G and 4G Non-HD Voice) 'Like-for-Like' device changes.
Caution Currently, 3G / 4G non-HD Voice CDMA devices can't be activated for any new line of service."