Verizon's coverage map lies, even though my entire city is theoretically fully covered unbroken 4g coverage, i fall onto 3g coverage once a day or so usually. My upload speeds are especially bad, sometimes under a 1mbps. Also your speeds probably dropped because more people in your area are using more data, and verizon needs more towers or a larger backhaul.
Hmmm, I would never have guessed. But I suspect that is true of all carriers.
They use an engineering program to "predict coverage areas" based on terrain and ideal conditions.
I can tell you though, that last month I spent a weekend in Windsor, Missery (Missouri) and was without any coverage at all the entire time I was there. My laptop, when logged into the hotel's WiFi brought up the VZW coverage map, and it shows the whole entire area to be saturated with 4g LTE.
Yeah, sure it is... I used the laptop to get onto chat with CS and told them about what is going on.
They said "uh, we have solid coverage there, look at your map "idiot"....
me, I reply, you are the idiot, I am the one on the phone w/o any signal and I have a cluster of friends here with me on VZW and none of them have a signal.
oh well, back to the ranch.
