Oops, sorry Early, I had no intention of breaking any rules. I won't entertain any further discussion on intentional bricking.
So to answer all other questions:
do you live in an area where they are upgrading to lte? because that will have a significant impact on your data speeds while they fiddle with the towers.
No, we're not getting LTE. I wouldn't doubt if we never get LTE, I live in the middle of nowhere. But my downloads go slower at home than with my old phone. Same setup (and different ones) left me with download speeds of 2.4Mbps on the old LTEvo and 0.3Mbps on the new one. Drastically huge difference. With Wifi even the speeds only get up to 0.4Mbps.
are you sure it's just your phone? maybe take it in to the store and run a side by side speed test with another phone.
My subjective feel caused me to run quadrant score tests and speed tests and they both backed me up. This new LTEvo runs objectively slower.
did you root again? if you are running a custom rom it may just be that the new phone hardware doesn't play nice with some tweak or another.
I did root again. None of the 7 ROMs I've tried have improved performance. Not even MeanROM, which is what always performed admirably on the old LTEvo.
Have you had a local Sprint repair center in a corporate store do an RF test to see if that's the problem?
I haven't done this. I'll have to try it. I was really hoping to avoid going to the Sprint store since the closest one is 21 miles away, but I'll try anything to fix this phone.
Tried GSam battery monitor to see if there's some rogue process hounding you stealing cycles?
I tried this, but nothing seemed to be running that I didn't want to. And I got the same speed test results and quadrant score results with only the app needed for the test running.
This phone is driving me up a wall. I miss my old LTEvo.