We investigate the computational hardness of the Connectivity, the Strong Connectivity and the Broadcast type of Range Assignment Problems in R2 and R3. We present new reductions for the Connectivity problem, which are easily adapted to suit the other two problems. All reductions are considerably simpler than the technically quite involved ones used in earlier works on these problems. Using our constructions, we can for the first time prove NP-hardness of these problems for all real distance-power gradients > 0 (resp. > 1 for Broadcast) in 2-d, and give improved lower bounds on the approximation ratios of all three problems