You might be experiencing pilot pollution. Your phone is seeing too many sites at once. This is of course if you are using CDMA (Verizon, Sprint, US Cellular, etc).

You'll poke your eye out!

All cell carriers do this normally. At my last apartment I was bouncing between 4 Verizon towers. None gave me good signal. :(

ATT is currently running HSDPA in a few areas, but most are only at 1.8Mbit/s. To my knowledge the phones ATT sells are only 3.6.Mbit/s