You may have incidentally caught your phone in the middle of the 5 minute LTE scan interval. As said above, the just cycling mobile data, whether manually or via the widget, does not recycle the baseband.
At least, I don't think it does. I'll go by the tower in NOLA East today and test it out and see what happens. The problem is, you can never tell where you're at in the middle of those 5 minute scans, so you have to do multiple tests inside a 5 minute window.