It's a real issue, but it only manifests itself in areas of low signal strength. I can get my phone to go to No Signal just by holding it at home, but at the coffee shop I frequently work from, I cannot reproduce it. My guess is that for all the bitching we tend to do about AT&T, they might actually have pretty decent coverage in general and it's only the people with homes or offices in the lower-power zones on the fringes of a cell's coverage area that see the problem.