I implemented the same behavior in a different Google product.
I remember the PM working on this feature showing us their research on how iPhones rendered bars across different versions.
They had different spectrum ranges, one for each of maybe the last 3 iPhone versions at the time. And overlayed were lines that indicated the "breakpoints" where iPhones would show more bars.
And you could clearly see that on every release, iPhones were shifting the all the breakpoints more and more into the left, rendering more bars with less signal strength.
We tried to implement something that matched the most recent iPhone version.
To be sure, is it possible that, on each subsequent iPhone release, the hardware got better at handling weak signals, and thus a mediocre signal for iPhone N was decent for iPhone N+2 and would give great throughput on iPhone N+4?
> And you could clearly see that on every release, iPhones were shifting the all the breakpoints more and more into the left, rendering more bars with less signal strength.
One thing explaining this might be that advancements in antenna design, RF component selection including the actual circuit board and especially (digital) signal processing allow a baseband to get an useful signal out of signal strengths that would have been just noise for older technology.
In ham radio in particular, the progress is amazing. You can do FT8 worldwide (!) communication on less than 5 watts of power, that's absolutely insane.
A friend recently got a (carrier-supplied) phone and has been complaining about how it would often have no reception despite showing a good signal; taking mine to the same areas on the same carrier and doing a comparison, mine was indeed showing no bars on the signal indicator. The difference is, mine predates this stupidity, and I can also see the details in the MTK Engineer Mode app, which shows the actual signal strength --- it was around -140dBm when it was showing 0 bars.
> taking mine to the same areas on the same carrier and doing a comparison
Unfortunately I don't think it's that simple. I've seen one phone simultaneously show significantly different numbers of bars for two SIMs installed in it for the same exact network and operator. After a while they become similar... then differ again... etc.
I have no clue how to explain it yet, but what I do know is that it literally makes no sense with a naive model of how these work, whether you try to explain it as reception or deception.
I highly recommend Network Cell Info Lite app for the network diag. It shows signal strength with all details for each of the SIM modules, shows on a map in real time where are the base station you are currently connected to, and other interesting statistics.
-140 dBm is far beyond no coverage, yeah. -120 dBm is pretty much when LTE stops working (sometimes it can painfully stretch to -123 to -125 but usually not because of noise etc)
"Tests carried out by research group PolicyTracker, and shared with BBC's Morning Live, found that nearly 40% of the time a phone displays the 5G symbol, it is actually using a 4G connection"
I worked for a mobile network company a few years ago, the vibe I got there was that 5G penetration was still years away and that none of the providers were anywhere near ready for it.
Interestingly that company built a bridge of sorts allowing providers to get more life out of their older hard and software, converting e.g. 5G signals to 4G and 4G to 3G (where a signal is for example a phone phoning home telling the provider they used a megabyte of data, or looking up the IP address when calling a phone number)
Also where 2/3/4G network signals were all their own protocols (RADIUS and DIAMETER), 5G is just HTTP. And where for the 3G/4G stuff they had to write their own code to handle the protocols, for the 5G stuff they just used the cURL library. That is, cURL powers 5G networks.
At least there's some merit to that, since many network don't yet use a 5G core (or SIM cards aren't capable of using it), so the definition of when you "are on 5G" is really murky: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/5g-nsa
> You know, I don't recall ever seeing 1 bar of signal strength on a smartphone.
I do.
I'm from Germany, land of perpetual EDGEing. Highest total GDP in the EU but can't build a mobile network for the life of it.
Then again we somehow forgot how to run trains and build cars without cheating, so I guess it fits.
Want to see a single bar? Come visit, our carriers aren't on the list with that inflate flag enabled. I guess they didn't get the same memo as the car manufacturers ;D
I work with cellular BDA-DAS[1] gear sometimes, and I don't recall the last time I looked at the signal strength display on my phone. It has probably been years.
For me: It either works, or it doesn't work. It is either fast-enough, or impossibly-slow. It's very binary, and the bar graph at the top never told me a damned thing about what I should expect.
[1]: Bi-Directional Amplifier, Distributed Antenna System. In theory, such constructs can make indoor cellular coverage quite good inside of buildings that previously had none. In reality it can be... complicated. And while the bar graph doesn't mean anything, I still need ways to see what's happening as I spend hours, days, or [sometimes!] weeks surveying and troubleshoot and stuff. The phone can report things like RSRP, RSRQ, and some other tasty bits instead of just a useless graph -- and from there, I can sometimes make a hand-waving guess as to what I may reasonably expect for performance.
But that stuff is normally pretty well hidden from view.
I had a very dangerous 1-bar the other day. You see I was in the Canadian wilderness relying on iPhone text-over-satellite, which works well, but only when you have no signal. I needed to relay a message to the rest of my group when suddenly I find myself with one bar of 3G that was completely and totally inoperable. No messages were getting through. But to make matters worse, since my phone thought it had a bar, it wouldn't activate satellite. I tried every setting and then for 20 minutes hiding behind various rocks to try to get my one bar to go away when finally I found a spot that would let me satellite text again.
Try going into a Home Depot. I don't think I've ever found one where aside from fairly near the front I've had other than 0 or 1 bars, across a variety of phones and carriers and in neighborhoods where the signal outside the store was strong.
The net is telling me this is because of the aisle after aisle of tall metal shelving and the building itself also has a lot of metal in the construction.
It is quite annoying when you are trying to use the Home Depot app to look up something.
I’ve always just blamed the extreme bloat of the web and lack of design around poor connections for 2bar lack of performance. HN usual works fine on but that’s about it for sites I visit.
Consider yourself blessed, the one place in my neighborhood where I get one bar on LTE is the same place I once was repairing my car. Awful experience but the rest of the subdivision is fine.
For some reason, I've spent several weeks (across a few years) in Italy with exactly one bar of signal strength on an iPhone when roaming on Vodafone.
It must actually be tricky to space out towers that sparsely without creating any obvious coverage gaps, but if anyone is up to the task, it's certainly Vodafone (let's not talk about the actual service quality, though).
Android phones show 1 bar pretty reasonably and fair. To illustrate this, I have 1 bar on both my SIM modules right now, which translates to the -125 dBm signal on both. So the connection is up, but it is borderline low.
Our house is in kind of a hollow despite being in a city, and I (and guests - all networks seem just as bad) get one bar basically all the time at home.
Phone calls are hit-and miss without WiFi calling switched on.
I see it all the time driving through the country. Probably a dozen times just today driving through the american east coast. I agree that two bars is the bare minimum for any functionality though.
Heh, my phone consistently reports 1 bar inside my apartment within a major metropolitan area. Indeed binary, because it works enough for the few times I actually take calls not on wifi.
I would assume that this was a carrier request/demand that got filtered down to some poor employee that had to implement it. There’s a linked bug, but the bug is restricted.
IIRC this really took off with the antennagate fiasco on the iphone 4. I was working for Verizon at the time and this was also the first one we were able to sell. I forget who it was that did it but I believe it was Apple in response to people "holding their phone wrong" so they bumped everything up a bar so you couldn't tell. There was a lot of competition at the time but also all the androids had better margins so they wanted us to sell those instead.
Heh, funny. I recently implemented a countdown for a teleprompting app and that's exactly what I ended up doing to make the countdown "feel right".
The countdown in question doesn't display fractions of a second so it would immediately switch from "5 seconds left" to "4 seconds left" which just doesn't feel right. Adding 0.5s solved the issue.
Is there any reason to believe this mechanism is actually there to help carriers deceive users? To me this looks like it's intended to address some other issue, like perhaps "I have zero bars shown, what do you mean I'm still connected? That that clearly means I'm disconnected..." I feel like anything intended to lie to users would not be implemented in this manner.
Think about all the various policies, dishonesty, PR spin, marketing, price-gouging, hidden fees, elimination of lifetime programs, and yes, outright fraud you've become aware of over the years. Just sit quietly for a moment, let those ideas stew. And if after one minute of silence you still feel the need to bestow upon these companies the most generous interpretation of their conduct possible, well, I'll be slightly surprised but I suppose that would conclude our conversation.
Android users can enter *#*#INFO#*#* on the phone app's numeric keypad to open a diagnostics tool, which includes a submenu that shows signal strength in dBm.
It's handy for locating sweet spots and dead zones in my home.
Maybe because the signal strength might not work as users expect?
Signal strength is like the loudness of music being heard. It's possible for music to be quiet but otherwise excellent, or loud but low-quality. However, if it is too quiet, then the "music" becomes almost unintelligible, which the offseted bars should still be able to indicate.
In Wi-Fi, 6GHz and 5GHz are often used instead of 2.4GHz. 2.4GHz would likely win in signal strength. Yet, the others are used anyway, because the others are good for other reasons. However, if range (
...or compatibility) is critical, then 2.4GHz is used.
Similarly, in cellular, there is a lower frequency e.g. band 8/12/14/17/20/28/71 and a higher frequency e.g. band 1/3/7/30/38/40/41/66/77/78. (Less basically, it can be more granular.)
So this sequence of events is possible: Tower switches the phone to a higher frequency -> speed increases but the signal strength reduces (confusing, but at least doesn't seem bad if there are 3 or 4 bars.) A switch to a lower frequency normally occurs instead if the high frequency signal is weak.
Cellular can be slow due to interference (maybe more common than signal strength issues; the metric to use instead might be SNR/SINR), congestion (maybe more common than signal strength issues; the metric to use instead is confusing, maybe the CFI value (if automatically changed) or RSRQ with a high SNR/SINR might rule it out), the speed of the rest of the network (the metric to use might be RSRQ during a download with a high SNR/SINR), data plan (the metric to use instead might be RSRQ during a download with a high SNR or SINR/QCI (requires interpretation)), and the width of it (the metric to use is BW). So it's confusing, and not exactly that full bars are always better.
For 2G, with each nearby cell (coverage area) basically getting its own channels, signal strength might've been more important, though interference was there somewhat (so there was MAIO planning etc.)
But aside from speed, there's the battery to consider. If the signal strength from the tower to the phone is "satisfactory", it's implied that so is the signal from the phone to the tower, so the phone will have to have an elevated transmit power.
There is a logical and reasonable explanation. These companies are run by a bunch of sociopathic, unethical people who won't hesitate to lie and cheat if it gets them more money. It's as simple as that.
If you use some app such as Network Survey (open source, Android), you can see that providers also lie about the type of connection. I'm on LTE now, but provider makes phone display 5G.
And this is on non-provider phone, this is built in in the whatever communication they do with the phone, possibly works with every device.
Technically not lying if this is NSA (non-standalone) 5G. The 5G band just comes on as an additional aggregated band. The icon just shows up because the tower is capable of supplying the band.
Really the bigger problem is that there's not enough distinction between SA and NSA
With Three UK I used gathered evidence over the course of 4 months to wiggle myself out of a £46/month 28-month 5G contract (had to pay £200 remaining on my iPhone 16 Pro) when I demonstrated that my phone was basically useless whenever in the postcode are where I live, even if I always had 1 bar 5G signal.
Not even phone calls would go through, let alone calls on Whatsapp et al, or loading websites using something heavier than just text.
Have raised a _formal_ complaint (they must report it to Ofcom), and after that it was just a matter of ensuring I lost enough phone calls to demonstrate how many ended up in my answering machine.
The fact that Wifi calling is also super buggy and almost never work, played also a big role.
My problem is, all other mobile providers in my area are even worse, showing LTE or 4G. So I just need to wait for them to strengthen signal, or move!
I'm a former Three user in central London. When I started it was good, then they advertised cheap unlimited data contracts which overloaded their system and they became close to unusable. You'd order an Uber, go down to meet it and be stuck because there was zero data. It wasn't a signal strength thing - it was a system overload thing.
I'm now on O2 which works kind of normally and also have a silent link esim which is a good backup. They cost like £8, never expire and let you use any UK network you choose if one isn't working. Or almost any network globally for that matter.
WiFi calling is the one of the most improperly implemented feature by carriers. Some just straight up deny WiFi calling if you're in airplane mode but connected to a WiFi.
I would rather see a live speed test number, emoji, or something. The signal frequency or strength doesn’t matter if the tower equipment is overloaded with users and running at dialup speeds.
I’ve been in bad tower areas where the solution is to drive to the next town or tower along the highway.
In AirBnB and Booking.com apartments the camera is off when the owner says "don't worry, it's turned off". The camera is turned off even harder when English is not the main language of the country.
Until about March this year, it was excellent and I used it as my home broadband. 60MB/s down, 20MB/s up on a good day. Much better than any ADSL I'm able to get.
Since March, from about 10:30am until 5pm some days, and late evening other days, there is no working data, and occasionally no working voice, despite the 5 bars.
It's working fine until then, and then it just stops completely, fading over the course of maybe 10 minutes. This happens all 7 days of the week.
The working theory is congestion at the base station. That's consistent with the occasional 6 minute ping times that I've measured, and more usual 20-30 second ping times, when anything gets through at all.
Still shows 5 bars. Three's coverage map says it's good here. Just can't use it.
That is a tricky one. I caught myself comparing bars to a friend’s phone before wondering if changing carriers would give me better signal in a certain area.
Having no knowledge about this isn't there a possibility that this is innocuous, that is that there is some difference in how each provider, such as T-Mobile or Verizon, etc., send the data about how many bars are available such that it needs to be bumped by one?
if we cared about signal strength, we'd make it part of the telecommunications regulated sphere: you must back your meter with a path which shows signal strength accurate to xDB in some yUnits of zQuality measured at one of A,B conforming labs
I frequently find that my data service is completely broken even when I have full 5G bars. Inflating by one is lame but doesn't explain this behavior. Is this a T-Mobile thing or is it widespread these days? I don't remember it happening so much 3+ years ago.
Signal strength is a measure of how proximate you are to the tower in terms of radio connectivity, but it says nothing about whether or not the tower will respond to you in a timely fashion, the tower backhaul capacity, etc. Usually this happens because you have a great connection to the tower in theory, but in-practice you can't get meaningful bandwidth and everything appears broken. This is really common at sporting events and other large crowd gatherings, which is also why a lot of the promise of 5G was that increased work with OFDMA in trying to service more customers in the same physical space adequately.
It's probably a reasonable pitch to say that phones should instead display something closer to "meaningful available bandwidth" crossed with strength, because a strong signal doesn't mean a good connection.
Maybe related to 5G? There are a couple spots near me (in particular, a somewhat crowded open mall) where I have solid bars but zero connectivity. Dropping to 4G works in most cases.
Are signal strength indicators even useful anymore these days?
I've long (at least since 3G) considered cell signal to be a binary property (available or not), with the much more important criterion being available data rate.
Poking around the config files, AT&T and two other carriers (both of which are subsidiaries, from a quick Google) seem to display 3G connections as if they were 4G:
Android documents[0] this flag, which they don't appear to do for the `inflate_signal_strength_bool` field outside the source code from what I can tell. It seems like there a bunch of odd flags for controlling user-exposed visuals - another flag `show_4g_for_lte_data_icon_bool` is used by 96 carriers, for example.
I wonder if there's some odd telecom history behind these, or if these flags were intended for some kind of edge-case. It seems like carriers have the option to arbitrarily override the thresholds used for determining signal strength[1], but only four carriers actually do. All only elect to customize the `lte_rsrp_thresholds_int_array` field; and all opt to make things harder for themselves, reporting their network connection as lower strength than the default classification[2] would:
The same is done without modifying Android, likely nearly everywhere in the world, but maybe not every provider. Provider sends a config information of "Network Override" and can make your phone display any network type. I see this happening in Network Survey app (open source) with my provider.
AT&T has a history of lying about what its network is. They were advertising HSPA+ as 4G and then recently started advertising LTE as "5G E". I can't find a lot of articles about the 4G branding one since the 5G one started.
> show_4g_for_lte_data_icon_bool
Realistically I think this is just a choice that many carriers made. It's quite common to see 4G instead of LTE outside of the US. Technically speaking I think WiMAX counted as 4G when there were competing 4G standards and you could make an argument that LTE is just one of the 4G standards.
zabumafu|3 months ago
I remember the PM working on this feature showing us their research on how iPhones rendered bars across different versions.
They had different spectrum ranges, one for each of maybe the last 3 iPhone versions at the time. And overlayed were lines that indicated the "breakpoints" where iPhones would show more bars.
And you could clearly see that on every release, iPhones were shifting the all the breakpoints more and more into the left, rendering more bars with less signal strength.
We tried to implement something that matched the most recent iPhone version.
waterhouse|3 months ago
JoshTriplett|3 months ago
So, game-theoretic evil?
hshdhdhehd|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
mschuster91|3 months ago
One thing explaining this might be that advancements in antenna design, RF component selection including the actual circuit board and especially (digital) signal processing allow a baseband to get an useful signal out of signal strengths that would have been just noise for older technology.
In ham radio in particular, the progress is amazing. You can do FT8 worldwide (!) communication on less than 5 watts of power, that's absolutely insane.
userbinator|3 months ago
The signal strength measurement is actually standardised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_signal#ASU
dataflow|3 months ago
Unfortunately I don't think it's that simple. I've seen one phone simultaneously show significantly different numbers of bars for two SIMs installed in it for the same exact network and operator. After a while they become similar... then differ again... etc.
I have no clue how to explain it yet, but what I do know is that it literally makes no sense with a naive model of how these work, whether you try to explain it as reception or deception.
Yizahi|3 months ago
MaxL93|3 months ago
gadders|3 months ago
"Tests carried out by research group PolicyTracker, and shared with BBC's Morning Live, found that nearly 40% of the time a phone displays the 5G symbol, it is actually using a 4G connection"
Cthulhu_|3 months ago
Interestingly that company built a bridge of sorts allowing providers to get more life out of their older hard and software, converting e.g. 5G signals to 4G and 4G to 3G (where a signal is for example a phone phoning home telling the provider they used a megabyte of data, or looking up the IP address when calling a phone number)
Also where 2/3/4G network signals were all their own protocols (RADIUS and DIAMETER), 5G is just HTTP. And where for the 3G/4G stuff they had to write their own code to handle the protocols, for the 5G stuff they just used the cURL library. That is, cURL powers 5G networks.
lxgr|3 months ago
crtasm|3 months ago
metadat|3 months ago
Human brains: wow, what a bunch of suckers. Damn.
By the way, is it legal to be deceptive in this way?
eqvinox|3 months ago
I do.
I'm from Germany, land of perpetual EDGEing. Highest total GDP in the EU but can't build a mobile network for the life of it.
Then again we somehow forgot how to run trains and build cars without cheating, so I guess it fits.
Want to see a single bar? Come visit, our carriers aren't on the list with that inflate flag enabled. I guess they didn't get the same memo as the car manufacturers ;D
ssl-3|3 months ago
I work with cellular BDA-DAS[1] gear sometimes, and I don't recall the last time I looked at the signal strength display on my phone. It has probably been years.
For me: It either works, or it doesn't work. It is either fast-enough, or impossibly-slow. It's very binary, and the bar graph at the top never told me a damned thing about what I should expect.
[1]: Bi-Directional Amplifier, Distributed Antenna System. In theory, such constructs can make indoor cellular coverage quite good inside of buildings that previously had none. In reality it can be... complicated. And while the bar graph doesn't mean anything, I still need ways to see what's happening as I spend hours, days, or [sometimes!] weeks surveying and troubleshoot and stuff. The phone can report things like RSRP, RSRQ, and some other tasty bits instead of just a useless graph -- and from there, I can sometimes make a hand-waving guess as to what I may reasonably expect for performance.
But that stuff is normally pretty well hidden from view.
pants2|3 months ago
tzs|3 months ago
The net is telling me this is because of the aisle after aisle of tall metal shelving and the building itself also has a lot of metal in the construction.
It is quite annoying when you are trying to use the Home Depot app to look up something.
davemp|3 months ago
tiznow|3 months ago
lxgr|3 months ago
It must actually be tricky to space out towers that sparsely without creating any obvious coverage gaps, but if anyone is up to the task, it's certainly Vodafone (let's not talk about the actual service quality, though).
Yizahi|3 months ago
Wifi-calling to the rescue :)
bombcar|3 months ago
But one bar is death for Internet - though HN will often load; anything heavier won’t.
jrmg|3 months ago
Phone calls are hit-and miss without WiFi calling switched on.
MangoToupe|3 months ago
dawnerd|3 months ago
3eb7988a1663|3 months ago
mattmaroon|3 months ago
jmspring|3 months ago
unknown|3 months ago
[deleted]
OptionOfT|3 months ago
I don't know if I want my name on an open source project attached to a commit whose only purpose is to lie?
wolfd|3 months ago
sanex|3 months ago
SkiFire13|3 months ago
That's not something I was expecting to hear
Leftium|3 months ago
(Probably a way to do it on Android, too)
A CSR showed me this while debugging network connectivity issues with my phone.
alberth|3 months ago
Like what Apple does with stopwatch.
https://lukashermann.dev/writing/why-the-iphone-timer-displa...
happytoexplain|3 months ago
kybernetyk|3 months ago
The countdown in question doesn't display fractions of a second so it would immediately switch from "5 seconds left" to "4 seconds left" which just doesn't feel right. Adding 0.5s solved the issue.
godelski|3 months ago
vachina|3 months ago
This signal strength is straight up lying about the actual signal strength
dataflow|3 months ago
Maxious|3 months ago
userbinator|3 months ago
NoMoreNicksLeft|3 months ago
charcircuit|3 months ago
Is the commit that added it.
sharts|3 months ago
foresto|3 months ago
It's handy for locating sweet spots and dead zones in my home.
jesprenj|3 months ago
NoPicklez|3 months ago
objectcode|3 months ago
Signal strength is like the loudness of music being heard. It's possible for music to be quiet but otherwise excellent, or loud but low-quality. However, if it is too quiet, then the "music" becomes almost unintelligible, which the offseted bars should still be able to indicate.
In Wi-Fi, 6GHz and 5GHz are often used instead of 2.4GHz. 2.4GHz would likely win in signal strength. Yet, the others are used anyway, because the others are good for other reasons. However, if range ( ...or compatibility) is critical, then 2.4GHz is used.
Similarly, in cellular, there is a lower frequency e.g. band 8/12/14/17/20/28/71 and a higher frequency e.g. band 1/3/7/30/38/40/41/66/77/78. (Less basically, it can be more granular.)
So this sequence of events is possible: Tower switches the phone to a higher frequency -> speed increases but the signal strength reduces (confusing, but at least doesn't seem bad if there are 3 or 4 bars.) A switch to a lower frequency normally occurs instead if the high frequency signal is weak.
Cellular can be slow due to interference (maybe more common than signal strength issues; the metric to use instead might be SNR/SINR), congestion (maybe more common than signal strength issues; the metric to use instead is confusing, maybe the CFI value (if automatically changed) or RSRQ with a high SNR/SINR might rule it out), the speed of the rest of the network (the metric to use might be RSRQ during a download with a high SNR/SINR), data plan (the metric to use instead might be RSRQ during a download with a high SNR or SINR/QCI (requires interpretation)), and the width of it (the metric to use is BW). So it's confusing, and not exactly that full bars are always better.
For 2G, with each nearby cell (coverage area) basically getting its own channels, signal strength might've been more important, though interference was there somewhat (so there was MAIO planning etc.)
But aside from speed, there's the battery to consider. If the signal strength from the tower to the phone is "satisfactory", it's implied that so is the signal from the phone to the tower, so the phone will have to have an elevated transmit power.
kouteiheika|3 months ago
There is a logical and reasonable explanation. These companies are run by a bunch of sociopathic, unethical people who won't hesitate to lie and cheat if it gets them more money. It's as simple as that.
ashirviskas|3 months ago
And this is on non-provider phone, this is built in in the whatever communication they do with the phone, possibly works with every device.
kotaKat|3 months ago
Man, I love my HSPA+ “4G”!
MaxL93|3 months ago
Really the bigger problem is that there's not enough distinction between SA and NSA
2dvisio|3 months ago
Not even phone calls would go through, let alone calls on Whatsapp et al, or loading websites using something heavier than just text.
Have raised a _formal_ complaint (they must report it to Ofcom), and after that it was just a matter of ensuring I lost enough phone calls to demonstrate how many ended up in my answering machine.
The fact that Wifi calling is also super buggy and almost never work, played also a big role.
My problem is, all other mobile providers in my area are even worse, showing LTE or 4G. So I just need to wait for them to strengthen signal, or move!
tim333|3 months ago
I'm now on O2 which works kind of normally and also have a silent link esim which is a good backup. They cost like £8, never expire and let you use any UK network you choose if one isn't working. Or almost any network globally for that matter.
mijoharas|3 months ago
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocell
navigate8310|3 months ago
instagib|3 months ago
I’ve been in bad tower areas where the solution is to drive to the next town or tower along the highway.
Towaway69|3 months ago
lifestyleguru|3 months ago
jlokier|3 months ago
Until about March this year, it was excellent and I used it as my home broadband. 60MB/s down, 20MB/s up on a good day. Much better than any ADSL I'm able to get.
Since March, from about 10:30am until 5pm some days, and late evening other days, there is no working data, and occasionally no working voice, despite the 5 bars.
It's working fine until then, and then it just stops completely, fading over the course of maybe 10 minutes. This happens all 7 days of the week.
The working theory is congestion at the base station. That's consistent with the occasional 6 minute ping times that I've measured, and more usual 20-30 second ping times, when anything gets through at all.
Still shows 5 bars. Three's coverage map says it's good here. Just can't use it.
NooneAtAll3|3 months ago
TheDong|3 months ago
[1]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+...
jwrallie|3 months ago
explosion-s|3 months ago
ggm|3 months ago
if we cared about signal strength, we'd make it part of the telecommunications regulated sphere: you must back your meter with a path which shows signal strength accurate to xDB in some yUnits of zQuality measured at one of A,B conforming labs
modeless|3 months ago
Shank|3 months ago
It's probably a reasonable pitch to say that phones should instead display something closer to "meaningful available bandwidth" crossed with strength, because a strong signal doesn't mean a good connection.
moribvndvs|3 months ago
lxgr|3 months ago
I've long (at least since 3G) considered cell signal to be a binary property (available or not), with the much more important criterion being available data rate.
justahuman74|3 months ago
NotMelNoGuitars|3 months ago
I wonder if there's some odd telecom history behind these, or if these flags were intended for some kind of edge-case. It seems like carriers have the option to arbitrarily override the thresholds used for determining signal strength[1], but only four carriers actually do. All only elect to customize the `lte_rsrp_thresholds_int_array` field; and all opt to make things harder for themselves, reporting their network connection as lower strength than the default classification[2] would:
[0]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/Ca...[1]: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/signal-strength...
[2]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/...
ashirviskas|3 months ago
Shank|3 months ago
https://www.theverge.com/2011/05/04/536673/att-t-mobile-dipp...
AT&T has a history of lying about what its network is. They were advertising HSPA+ as 4G and then recently started advertising LTE as "5G E". I can't find a lot of articles about the 4G branding one since the 5G one started.
> show_4g_for_lte_data_icon_bool
Realistically I think this is just a choice that many carriers made. It's quite common to see 4G instead of LTE outside of the US. Technically speaking I think WiMAX counted as 4G when there were competing 4G standards and you could make an argument that LTE is just one of the 4G standards.
Havoc|3 months ago
It’s showing full or near full bars even in places I can’t load light sites like hn properly.
Psychology tricks like these only work if you don’t overdo it
sharts|3 months ago
doctorpangloss|3 months ago
jb1991|3 months ago
sammy2255|3 months ago
Wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20251103013626/https://nickvsnet...
jb1991|3 months ago
horizonVelox999|3 months ago