Today Apple posted an open letter on their website stating that the apparent reception issues people are seeing with the “Death Grip” are caused by a bad algorithm they used for setting the number of bars.  I am sure this will fix a majority of the issues people are seeing, but who knows.

Here is the code I recommend for iOS 4.0.1 to fix the bug in the method for returning the number of bars to show.
public int getNumberOfBarsToDisplay(int signalStrengthDecibels)
{
    //if(signalStrengthDecibels < -113)
    //{
    //    return 0;
    //}
    //else if(signalStrengthDecibels < -107)
    //{
    //    return 1;
    //}