ROM and reception/data speed?

[AceXMachine]

The way I understand it, the base ROM has nothing to do with reception, and the PRL has only a little to do with it. If you are in the same area where you used to get "more bars" and now only get 1, there can really be only 2 possibilities. Phone is damaged, or there has been a network change, whether an outage or re-orientation of your serving cell site. Only way to know is to have someone with the same ROM/Radio on the same model phone in the same area. If the difference is significant, then it is the phone. If not, then something else has changed.