Good direction, but bad conclusion: "poor signal" is not the same thing as "congestion". This fact is what causes TCP over any form of wireless (including high-speed WiFi) to have been a really bad decision (and one that academic researchers the world over love trying to solve ;P).
The reason is that TCP makes an assumption (almost entirely true in the case of physical cable) that "packet loss" is always caused by "congestion" (due to the router simply throwing away packets it cannot handle), and so if you are losing packets you need to slow down your rate of sending, to help more of them get through.
However, if the reason you are losing packets is "poor signal", then you are going to get a pretty much constant rate of packet loss: if 10% of your airwaves are "damaged", 10% of your packets are going to be lost whether you are sending them at 100k/s or 1b/s (as your choice of "when to send" is entirely random from the perspective of the interference: your device is not modeling the underlying issue so it can try to "dodge the raindrops"; people work on this, though ;P).
The result is that when your signal is bad, even if you are currently getting 90k/s out after 10% loss, your standard TCP stack goes "oh shit" and starts dialing down its transmit window to "virtually nothing", leaving you unable to use that connection to get any data through anymore; even just opening a new connection when this happens (which may require restarting the app) tends to help tremendously.
(The solutions, for the record, all involve some sort of mechanism that allows explicit bookkeeping of either packet loss or congestion. However, this explicit bookkeeping requires various players that are not the device to be "in on it", and therefore makes it really hard to find the right balance of "who needs to install better routers to solve the problem", given the wide deployment of existing TCP... I mean, even getting IPv6 out there has been a tough sell, replacing IP entirely is a pipe-dream right now.)