Around here it's not at all uncommon to have areas with spotty 3G coverage. Sometimes it's enough to maintain phone connectivity but not enough for data; sometimes even normal telephony becomes unavailable.
Switching to GSM helps, but even then sometimes reception drops to zero. It usually rebounds as soon as you move a few metres away from the dead zone, but it's enough to momentarily disconnect the data link.

This wouldn't be much of a problem if it wasn't that the data connection doesn't come back up instantly when the link does; I set automatic connection on the GPRS network and set the search interval to 5 minutes, which is the shortest available, but that's still too long. Can it be somehow shortened to 1 minute or so? I'm ok with tinkering with configuration files via terminal.