IPhone 3G drops phone signal. Restore IOS?

Having upgraded to an iPhone4S, my wife inherited my old 3G. It has worked fine for years, but now in the past few weeks it will lose all phone signals, showing just "Searching...". WiFi is fine. Going to Airplane Mode and back doesn't help; only rebooting (turning off and then on) will restore the signal, full bars, fine for a day or so. This is in my house, with a good signal, and my 4S never drops it, so it's not a signal issue. Nor hardware, or why does a reboot bring it back? I'm thinking I should reinstall the IOS. Does a full reset to factory keep the existing IOS? I am fully up-to-date with whatever version 3G is up to. I want to reinstall it fresh: restoring it from a backup will only put back whatever problem it has, no? The various support pages are not clear on this. Mr. Google shows me some pages on how to revert to an older IOS; if I tried that, I would then automatically be presented the opportunity to update to latest, correct? I use Win7-64bit iTunes, though I have access to a Mac. TIA.

In this post you mentioned being an Ex-Genius, which I understood to mean you used to work for Apple. If so we should be asking you this question...
But that aside, I wonder if the network is dropping you back to Edge assuming there is no need to clog up the network with sleeping phones during high load times. Then when you wake your phone, it tries to jump from Edge to 3G and that is what you are seeing. Just Guessing here....
Also perhaps your battery being as low as is indicated caused the phone to go to deep power saving mode...
Message was edited by: icebike

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