dropped & garbled calls on JB'd 3GS (suddenly)

[Blueline29]

Hi all. First off, I did search but haven't seen a problem that's exactly like mine AND I kind of need to get this problem taken care of as quickly as possible as I have a series of important conference calls this afternoon that I can't miss. Today, all of a sudden, I'm dropping calls left, right, and sideways in areas where this has NEVER happened before (my house). My mom also said she heard very weird noises coming from my end of the line at a time when I wasn't even talking--she said they were ghostly-sounding garbled talk. I'd also recently noticed decreasing battery life and so was considering restoring as new but I'm a little scared I'm going to lose all of the hard work I did in jailbreaking and customizing my phone since July. So I guess my questions are as follows:

1. Does this even sound like a problem that a restore could fix (or at least improve)?

2. Are there still issues I need to worry about in terms of restoring and re-jailbreaking? I have a 32GB 3GS and it's still running 3.0.1 because I was afraid to upgrade.

3. It also has a crack near the headphone jack that I've let go because I didn't want to raise a ruckus over something so minor, but now it appears that the two sides of the crack are shifting a bit, like one side is now higher than the other side. Should I just restore and wipe out all trace of the JB and take it back in to Apple?

4. Sigh.

Thanks for all of the help, everybody!

 

[Blueline29]

Well, I ended up restoring and, so far, it doesn't look like the signal issue has improved much. I can at least get up to 4 bars now (3G), but it's also all over the place, sometimes dropping to 1 bar on Edge. Calls have sounded OK, but I guess the test will come when I have to jump on this conf call in an hour. I'm waiting to rejailbreak till after that in case something goes wrong, and it's killing me looking at a "stock" phone.

 

[Blueline29]

All of that being said, if anybody knows what the best course of action would be for the suddenly-horrible signal problem, I'd really appreciate the input. I'm clinging tenuously to a call I'm connected to right now.....and it just $#$%&ing dropped. I'll be calling AT&T (if I can stay connected long enough to speak to somebody!) to see if they have any thoughts, but would bringing it in to Apple do any good? Am I the only one to have this problem? Cell signal was perfect here yesterday, as it has been since I got my iPhone in June, and today it's awful.


ETA: Just got off the phone with AT&T & they said there's a known issue with signal strength being "extremely mediocre" in my area right now. Should be fixed by 4:45. I hope so. And now, I promise, I'm done postwhoring for the day.