Verizon vtext delivery delay

dono

Over the last few months I have experienced large delays in the time to deliver a message from Verizon, sometimes an hour to next day delivery. I was using gmail and read that Verizon was filtering messages from gmail, later switched to iCloud and initially was good now it is also delayed. I read on Verizon forums this is a common complaint to the point some "customer support" people stating that Verizon is moving away from the service. Short of moving to a 3rd party delivery service or moving to AT&T, has anyone worked around this problem? Thanks