Verizon Wireless 4G LTE customers experienced problems for the second Wednesday in three weeks, as another network outage plagued the “most reliable wireless network in the U.S.”

Verizon officials admitted the outage was a problem early this morning, mostly for 4G customers.  But many LTE phone owners found that switching their 4G phones to 3G service didn’t fix a thing, leaving them once again without any data service.

“When my 4G beacon switched off, the 3G beacon only stayed on a second before it was gone as well,” shares Stop the Cap! reader Roger, who lives in Denver.  “Even when I turned 4G off, 3G just would not stay enabled.”

This problem was remarkably similar to a lengthy day-and-a-half outage that brought down many of Verizon’s 4G customers on Dec. 6 and 7.

“Verizon Wireless 4G LTE service is returning to normal this morning after company engineers worked to resolve an issue with the 4G network during the early morning hours today,” the company said in a statement. “Throughout this time, 4G LTE customers were able to make voice calls and send and receive text messages. The 3G data network operated normally.”

That may be true for 3G-only customers.

Verizon’s second major national outage is starting to test the patience of some of its customers who bought service from the company based on its reliability track record.

“This is a second huge FAIL for Verizon in just a few weeks, and I’m growing annoyed,” Roger says. “I could live with a downgrade to 3G for a few hours, but Verizon 4G phones seem to have a problem stepping down to the slower network when there is a problem with their 4G LTE network.  This means 3G-only phone owners have service as usual, while the rest of us do not.”

Verizon’s 4G network is fast becoming among the world’s largest, and its penchant for service problems during the overnight hours likely means a software upgrade or patch is responsible.  As the update propagates across Verizon’s network, service problems begin to spread from region to region.

As LTE technology improves, Verizon customers are effectively beta-testers and suffer the consequences when a bad piece of software has unintended consequences.

Service credits are available on request from Verizon Wireless customer service.