VZW LTE looking good again in NYC

We at Comrex have been excited about LTE since we first heard about it in the early aughts. When it first hit, we were blown away at codec performance. One of my first real experiences was travelling to midtown Manhattan, a place where 3G had become congested to the point of unusability. At that time, performance was exceptional. But over the last two years we've heard frustration from ACCESS users that the Verizon LTE network in NYC (and a couple of other major markets) was increasingly quirky.
In conjunction with our friends at WCBS and Verizon we ran some extensive tests last year, and the results pointed to our preferred USB modem, the Pantech UML290. While this modem seems quite well behaved in most markets, it seems in a highly congested environment like NYC it has a tendency to get into a state of total data stoppage. This seems to occur at almost predicable cadence, with good data flowing for 1-3 minutes, followed by a data stoppage of 5-15 seconds.
Our working theory is that some kind of handoff is happening within these high-traffic networks that the Pantech takes some time to recover from. The only alternative modem, the Novatel 551L, has its own set of behavior problems that prevents us from recommending it. Up until now, the only real solution was use the provided Wi-fi dongle in conjunction with a Mi-fi hotspot-style device, which seemed to mitigate the issue nicely. But adding the extra radio layer isn't really a good engineering practice to this type of problem, especially in an environment with as much Wi-fi present as NYC (Note VZW does not currently supply Mi-fi hotspots with 5GHz capability).

Enter the Pantech UML295. This modem is now available from VZW (off contract price is $200) and is well worth the investment for an upgrade. We've completed an initial round of testing with some cooperative Comrex fans in NYC and the results are super. Money quote: "The card worked flawless!!!". It's currently supported in all LiveShot firmware, and test firmware for ACCESS portable is available from our support guys.