Service Bars: EDGE, 3G or both?

[Mobile923]

I had 2 bars of service with 3G enabled... When I disabled it, I got full bars with the EDGE icon...

I'm a little confused how AT&T's service works, I hear a lot about 2G voice and 3G voice... I thought that only referred to data transfer?

My question:
Do the service bars represent AT&T or the data type?

 

[emccus01]

The bars represent the strength of the signal indicated. If it says 3g then you have that many bars using 3g and your phone reception will be in accordance to that as well as your download speed. More bars mean the opportunity for better speed granted the network isn't being overloaded by many people using it.

I have a problem that no one can answer which is that I have some 3g bars and when I switch it off I get many EDGE bars. This is fine with me since I know 3g isn't around as much but my calls are suffering because the call seems to drop when the 3g runs out and it can't piggyback over to edge. This should be seamless but it turns out it isn't. Anyone else have this problem?

 

[julric01]

Actually it's looking like a Huge problem...

Just look on the apple website discssion forums - there's a thread with about 300 posts about how bad the 3G to Edge stuff is working and all the dropped calls on 3G because the network is so bad.

I think it's a combination of AT&T's network and a weak iPhone 3G reciever.