I pried all my connectors up and bridged the bottom cell antenna with a paperclip. Night and day difference with mobile reception. One thing I ran into was despite my improved cell and WiFi reception data was still awefully slow. Nearly down to a crawl with pages timing out often. As a last resort I did a restore which improved everything immensely including what's registered for reception after the mods. This tells me there is a major firmware issues that tweaks the phone after use for awhile that only a fresh restore seems to restore.
My browser would do that also although facebook would work fine, sites like cnn and such would not. I found the fix is to switch to airplane mode for about 2 seconds then back. It seems to happen when transitioning between 3g and wifi hotspots, or if you lose 3g and then come back in range.