Same here, and I'm sure many others with Elites have done this as it sounds like. Virgin tech support and their US engineering group aren't equipped to truly troubleshoot the network since they dont have their own, maybe if your lucky it would make it to a sprint engineer but then probably at the very bottom of their tech support line to then have to work all the way up that one too past the non-technical people.
They ride on Sprint, sprint is the one who my money says is who decided to make our performance sub-par to benefit their core customers, through instituting some sort of spectrum governor to keep select phones lowest priority (being Virgin/etc/etc of the handful that are either wholly owned by Sprint or just renting their network)
This is my thought after spending over a month with their tech support and really nothing fixing it, and noticing my problems go away as I leave populated areas. Thats the real key that makes be believe its on purpose and not a technical bug, and because we pay less, and also to a subsidiary, we get less.
There's plenty of people on here who have repeatedly said their Elite works great, their data doesn't constantly drop in-between renegotiating speeds up and down from 1X and 3G. My guess is they are in a beefier network area or less populated area.
As I said, I live in Milwaukee area - and mine has good and bad days, lately its been getting better as for 3G being on more of the time but still probably only less than 50%, which is better than it started at 3-4 months ago when I got the phone after my Optimus V fell too many feet of a stairwell to a tile floor.
What cities are you in that have good/medium/bad service? Maybe someone could make a web based survey from a free survey site for the Elite Cell performance?