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?
Possible sure, but wouldn't it be better marketing for the iphone to have better performance on lower bars? Phones are judged for their performance, but network providers for the number of bars they show on the screen.
Bars are supposed to be an indicator of actually achievable quality of service, in my view. I don't care why I can use my network where I am, I just want to know whether I can.
The comment you’re replying to is incredibly concerning. Is he saying people at Google are purposefully misrepresenting signal strength so they can “compete” with Apple?
Bars really don’t matter. You can have full bars and slow to no internet. You can have one bar but relatively decent internet. Honestly kind of wish the signal display would go away and instead show me when I lose internet.
When you lose internet, you get a ! next to the bars (at least I have on my last few androids). Usually I also have no bars when I lose internet, but sometimes I've got coverage without data flow.
And while we're at it: Just surface the fact that connectivity sucks to applications (maybe even at the socket layer, by just closing them if there's not been any forward progress for a certain time), rather than showing me loading screens that'll never go anywhere for minutes.
This would give apps that do have some offline caching the chance of falling back to that (looking at a certain green music streaming service here).
It is surfaced to apps, but the "just detecting that connectivity sucks" heuristic turns out to be not all that easy to implement. There doesn't seem to be a better heuristic than "try and let the app decide if waited too long".
That is literally what i am observing lately with my provider: i have 2 bars and yet i do not have internet, where as my gf, using the same iPhone model, with a different provider, having 2 bars, has perfect data connectivity.
I build apps at the moment, in addition to the phone's network indicators you really should provide your user with visible and live feedback to indicate whether the servers are reachable because there's so many things that can break down in between. Also programming your app for offline-first is good unless it's critically important the information is either live or absent. We allow offline access by using React Query and storing its caches in user storage.
> 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.
The phone selects a RAT (radio access technology) and frequency for each SIM slot.
After selecting, each SIM slot is subject to inter freq / inter RAT reselection / handover.
Both are controlled by messages received from the tower (e.g. on 4GLTE, for reselection, System Information messages), though there is an additional constraint: what's supported by/enabled in the phone.
Perhaps one SIM slot was in the connected state and the other was in the idle state at one point. So the reselection logic applied for one and the handover logic applied for the other. There is for example a problem called ping pong handover. Once a phone is switched to a different frequency or RAT, the tower may have the phone be sort of stuck in the new frequency, until the conditions of the previous RAT or frequency improve substantially, in order to prevent the phone being like a ping pong ball between the two. This frees resources that would otherwise be spent on repeated handover-related messages.
Each frequency has its own signal strength (free space path loss, transmit power, one frequency might be on one tower and another might be on another, etc).
This is usually for a good reason - dual sim phones are almost always “DSDS”, or “Dual SIM Dual Standby”. The secondary SIM, because it doesn’t need to make a data connection, parks itself on the lowest-frequency (and therefore usually lowest-bandwidth) connection it can find. Meanwhile, your data-connected SIM is busy trying to stream a video or upload your photos, so it’s using a higher-frequency + higher bandwidth connection, resulting in a lower signal strength.
> Meanwhile, your data-connected SIM is busy trying to stream a video or upload your photos
You're making huge and incorrect assumptions here, no? This also happens when your phone is entirely idle... and it randomly changes if you sit still for some time...
Your phone is never idle. Open your adb logs sometime and you'll see that it's doing a ton of stuff all the time. Much of which involves a network connection.
So your phone is basically always doing something, and frequently sending and receiving data when you assume it's doing nothing. By design, radios hop around between channels as conditions change. Another device somewhere outside your house kicked off a big transfer and your device hopper channels to avoid interference. Random atmospheric conditions introduced new noise, or another channel cleared up. This is standard, normal behavior for WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular, and essentially every other type of modern digital radio.
What you're seeing is normal and expected behavior. Modern radios and operating systems are vastly more complex than you're assuming.
I think it has more to do with the cellular modem itself, or precisely the firmware it's running; of which there is much more diversity on the Android side.
When we visit downtown of our city, I get great data coverage. My wife, on a different model but same gen iPhone and same plan, gets nothing. Her phone shows three or four bars but her apps won't load anything.
No idea why, especially since I'm the one who installs ad blockers and such. Her phone is essentially stock.
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.
Well, there is a paid version (which I didn't try), presumably without ads. As for the Lite version, I don't know exactly why, but ads in this particular app never load on my phone. I see only a black space at the bottom where they supposedly should be visible, but they never load for some reason, without any action from my side. And I think the same happened on my previous phone too, need to check later.
-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)
Yes, even thermal background noise (the noise level that exists even in complete absence of RF) would be expected to be above -140dBm. It scales with channel size and temperature.
As near as I can tell, the smallest subcarrier 5G can use is 15kHz, the thermal noise floor for a 15kHz channel at room temp (300K) would be -132 dBm.
My guess is whatever chip doing the measurement simply couldn't measure that low accurately, or it reports "nothing detected" as -140 dBm.
GPS receivers can go down to around -160dBm, but that's a very low bitrate signal. Nonetheless it is possible to receive such signals via CDMA techniques.
"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
The boneheaded decision to "privatize" rail by creating a state-owned corporation competing with itself, a network of regional corporations with extremely inconsistent funding and separate corporations for various services like literally maintaining infrastructure definitely has resulted in "too much DB". Although I sincerely doubt attempting to actually open up those "markets" by introducing foreign corporations like National Express really does anything other than cannibalize rail services even further.
I still can't get over the justification for abandoning the €9/month universal ticket experiment (and replacing it with a €49/month offering which has since been bumped to €58/month and will soon be raised to €63/month) officially being in part that "rail will be worse when more people use it" (the other mostly being "not enough people used it to demonstrate its value" and "people used the ticket for trips they otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford to make").
We should just nationalize it all properly and make it free at point of service. Let tourists use it for free too, obviously. Infrastructure exists so the economy can happen, its ROI is a functioning industry and society so stop trying to pretend we can reasonably measure its success in profit.
I feel you. We have stellar coverage pretty much everywhere in NL. Heck, I was recently in a work video meeting in the car, not a single drop. The route included part of this:
Interesting to see you have a different experience. I'm not sure I would call it stellar. On the train route between Den Haag and Amsterdam, one of the busiest routes in the country presumably, reception is constantly dropping out. I'd love to be able to work on the train, but it's completely impossible if you need a network connection for anything.
Perhaps the route being so busy is the cause of the connectivity issues, but it's still baffling to me how bad it is, given that the amount of mobile devices trying to connect must be very predictable.
+1 on the train, mobile internet in the train is really bad. I kinda get it because you're in a faraday cage, moving between cells quickly, and frequently far outside of inhabited areas but still.
I'm pretty sure the in-train internet also relies on mobile networks, so that's unreliable too. Plus any bandwidth is taken up by people scrolling through tiktok.
Germany is a developing country when it comes to broadband let alone wireless internet.
The short version is that the chancellor we had in the 1990s didn't like how the public broadcasting channels were talking about his failures and wanted to push the development of private broadcasters (who being beholden to financial interests rather than objective news coverage mostly spoke favorably of him) by prioritizing cable television over fiber. A surprising number of things came downstream from that pivotal decision, e.g. the completely braindead way we sold frequency bands (which resulted in some literally remaining unused because there were initially no requirements to actually do anything with them).
Moving to Germany from countries where mobile networks function is traumatic. My welcome experience was USB stick with faulty drivers, balance zeroed immediately because of not activated packet, then sipping expensive 1GB data packets over choppy connections. Of course that was all my fault. The only reliable thing was monthly billing and enforcement of contract length by the telecom. When I heard before arrival "there is no internet in the apartment but you can simply buy USB stick" I had subconsciously felt there will be problems. Fuck, I hate these memories so much. Fuck everything about it and everyone involved.
> Highest total GDP in the EU but can't build a mobile network for the life of it.
GDP per capita (or GDP per square metre) would be a more useful indication here. Otherwise, you could throw a bunch of poor countries together--just for purposes of statistics, and expect a better mobile network?
GDP per square metre is probably the best metric, even though it's the more rarely used one. [1] has a neat map of Europe by GDP density.
However Germany is still very high in both GDP per capita and GDP per land area. Roughly on par with the UK, and far higher than France which has a much better mobile network
> GDP per square metre is probably the best metric, even though it's the more rarely used one. [1] has a neat map of Europe by GDP density.
Well, it would be the best metric, if your country was homogeneously populated.
If everyone lives in one big city and there's literally no one in the rest of the country, then I expect mobile reception (and every other service) to be pretty good for everyone, because they all stay in the big city.
> However Germany is still very high in both GDP per capita and GDP per land area. Roughly on par with the UK, and far higher than France which has a much better mobile network
Yes, France, Germany and UK are all equal enough in these measures (well within an order of magnitude) that the much bigger difference in mobile networks is most likely due to some other factors.
> If everyone lives in one big city and there's literally no one in the rest of the country, then I expect mobile reception (and every other service) to be pretty good for everyone, because they all stay in the big city.
Sometimes the reception is good but the data rate is poor because of too few towers per person, or because the cellphone companies connections to the wider internet are saturated.
Luckily Germany is pretty homogeneously populated. Far more so than the UK (England is pretty even, but Scotland is far emptier) or France (1/5th live in the Paris metro area).
> GDP per square metre is probably the best metric
GDP per square metre only really works for countries with uniform population density. For example, by European standards, Spain is huge, and basically entirely empty outside of a handful of cities...
There are some economics of scale that work best at the country level.
Even with the EU single market, mobile phone operations almost always follow country borders. You'll get a different set of providers in Germany than you'll get one km away on the other side of the Rhine in France. Even though some of them may have the same name or the same ultimate owner or both, and even though you can roam on the other side of the border, you'll have a contract with a different entity, and different people will build and maintain the networking equipment.
Conversely, in the US, the major carriers all have nationwide coverage.
Thing is, mobile networks are national affairs. A bunch of small countries has a lot of small telcos. Germany has 3 (2? not sure with the mergers) large telcos.
I also do, I'm Australian. I regularly experience both congestion caused by tower over-subscription as well as traveling waaaay out into the country where there's no reception, even on the Telstra network that boasts better coverage than everyone else by a mile.
I rarely encounter outright congestion in Australia tbh, but then again I avoid watching videos on the train.. so that's probably indicative of something :D
Coverage is decent on Telstra, but if you're out of town reception is rarely any good, presumably because there's little to no incentive to improve it when there's no on around to need it.
Better coverage may be claimed. But as you know, Australia is a big place.
The few farmers I know have a rough idea of the on-the-ground cell coverage. They say things like "this side of the hill/town" usually. I've seen them deliberately walk to the other side of a silo to make a call.
I assume that the coverage maps are assumed cell-tower-coverage-if-shit-is-not-in-the-way. No surprise radios are common.
A Diné (Navajo) slang word for "cellphone" is "bił nijoobałí" which means "the thing you spin around with". Coverage on rez is not great you see, and in some places is so marginal that whether you get a usable signal depends not just on position but orientation...
Tangent but this is a pretty interesting topic. I've heard people speculate that local politics deliberately prevents such infrastructure, waiting for some kind of kickbacks to make it worth their while. Others suggest that it happens because federal telecom subsidies aimed at improving rural connectivity don't apply, as a kind of retaliation for tribal sovereignty. Way off-grid, ok, maybe it's simply not worth it to corporate telecom, but whatever the cause coverage even in fairly populated areas around Kayenta/Monument Valley is also quite bad in a way that would be infrequent in comparable communities in say, nowhere Appalachia.
Many a suburban parent of smart-phone addicted children would romanticize the whole thing and actually be kind of jealous of a situation like that. Years back and on the other side of the world, tourists were very scandalized about more roads and towers around Annapurna in Nepal.. but of course the locals usually do not actually like to be cut off from the world.
More telecom is probably good despite the evils, but fuck commercial billboards in particular. Those are still creeping closer to the Grand Canyons and Yosemites, and they suck whether it's for multinationals like McDonalds, or for locally owned gas stations or hotels that put cash into tribal communities. Ban them all like Hawaii, and everyone will be astonished to learn that the world keeps turning..
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.
> 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.
A few months ago, I was in a remote area at anchor on a sailboat, about 6.5 miles from the nearest highway through the swamp, with only a few farms and a handful of houses within that radius. With my phone up in the cockpit of the boat and tethered over WiFi to my laptop, I was able to download a movie. As the boat swung on anchor, the download was occasionally interrupted, but when data was flowing it was consistently 5-10 MB/s over a claimed 5G link; the movie downloaded in much less time than its runtime. I assume I wasn't competing with much other traffic on that tower, wherever it was. So my experience was even more binary than yours.
The phone's signal indicator did seem to accurately indicate when it had no usable signal at all, but beyond that I'm not sure it was providing any useful information. And I'm not sure if it could have told me anything of use other than "connected" or "not connected". The very marginal connection was still faster than I had any right to expect for those conditions.
I had my car break down in remote mountains and that little image had me climb up trees and eventually find a place where I could make a call from. Once I had two bars they could hear me, before that it was the case that they weren't getting what I was transmitting.
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.
My house is also like this. No signal on any carrier, and same with one of my neighbors but not neighbor on the opposite side.
Looking at satellite view it is clear that the local municipal water tower is between a huge cell tower near the highway and my house. All carriers seem to lease that same tower only in my area.
It wasn’t like this when I moved in but I guess the carriers consolidated on that big tower near the highway about two years ago.
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.
If you're counting up, round down. If you're counting down, round up. A human expects the count to finish at precisely the moment we get to the last number in the sequence (zero, for counting down). Do a count in your head to see what I mean.
Apple chose a compromise by rounding to nearest, for it to "feel good", but you lose the ability to exactly predict when the timer ends as a human. Typical Apple.
From looking at the bottom of the linked post (which says it was edited, not sure when in relation to your comment), it sounds like they wanted something that worked across arbitrary times split across units (hour/minute/seconds) without having to handle carry-over. I'm not sure I would choose to alter the times themselves over making the math a bit more complex, but the author has obviously thought about this a lot more than me, and it's nice that they at least considered that alternative.
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.
I think you missed important nuance in my comment. Note in my comment I was asking about this mechanism. I'm not suggesting the companies involved wouldn't deceive users. I merely question whether this is how they would do it. It feels way too simple, coarse, obvious/public, and inflexible if the goal is to trick users.
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 my boss asks me to do something, and I refuse, what do you imagine will happen? I will get fired for insubordination. It's pretty easy to get people onboard if their paycheck depends on it.
You'd need to have this specific request from supervisor on paper, with witnesses, all video recorded with supervisor's consent. Otherwise you'd be sued into poverty for besmirching.
When the supervisor fires you, for such a reason, it seemed to be important enough. You also don't need any proof to report someone to the authorities.
Even if the the company has enough lawyers to win in court, it is still expensive. That's why the lawyers are among the risk aversest. So reporting to a company internal lawyer might already be enough.
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.
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
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.
private int getNumLevels() {
if (mConfig.inflateSignalStrengths) {
return SignalStrength.NUM_SIGNAL_STRENGTH_BINS + 1;
}
return SignalStrength.NUM_SIGNAL_STRENGTH_BINS;
}
...
} else if (mCurrentState.connected) {
int level = mCurrentState.level;
if (mConfig.inflateSignalStrengths) {
level++;
}
return SignalDrawable.getState(level, getNumLevels(),
mCurrentState.inetCondition == 0);
If the flag is true, bump up BOTH the reported level as well as the total number of bins.
If the flag is false, use reported level and default number of bins.
Since both numerator and denominator are bumped up, is it really malicious?
Based on this commit at least, personally, I feel such logic could be due to a decision to shift from levels starting from 0 to levels starting from 1 at the UI level.
Or perhaps to make levels consistent between different operators, some of whom were using 0-based while others used 1-based.
I haven't gone through later commits or latest versions. So my opinion's limited just to this original 2017 change.
I'm surprised they even display the name and email of the person responsible for doing it. If I were forced to make such a change that I knew would be publicly displayed, I'd do everything possible to disclaim it (such as mentioning the one who actually requested 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?
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.
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.
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.
Because it's about signal strength, but also the hostname is "nick vs networking". And if your site can't handle a few hundred requests per second (which I seriously doubt the HN traffic is anywhere close to) on a static web page, then you're doing something wrong
I assume the irony is that an article about signal strength, which is closely related to data speed, is loading slowly because the site servers have slow data speed.
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?
Possible sure, but wouldn't it be better marketing for the iphone to have better performance on lower bars? Phones are judged for their performance, but network providers for the number of bars they show on the screen.
Bars are supposed to be an indicator of actually achievable quality of service, in my view. I don't care why I can use my network where I am, I just want to know whether I can.
The comment you’re replying to is incredibly concerning. Is he saying people at Google are purposefully misrepresenting signal strength so they can “compete” with Apple?
> We tried to implement something that matched the most recent iPhone version.
So, game-theoretic evil?
Don't be evil but also morality is relative.
Just like signal strength.
As long as we aren't the #1 most evil company, we're pretty fine
Thats why I experienced 2 bars equals zero internet today?
Bars really don’t matter. You can have full bars and slow to no internet. You can have one bar but relatively decent internet. Honestly kind of wish the signal display would go away and instead show me when I lose internet.
When you lose internet, you get a ! next to the bars (at least I have on my last few androids). Usually I also have no bars when I lose internet, but sometimes I've got coverage without data flow.
You can have full bars and no internet when jammed in a crowded space with full pipes. Just because the PHY is linked doesn't mean you have internet.
True, but brownout due to network congestion is not the complaint here.
Wish Apple would do that. It’s kind of a guessing game.
You should but you don't always
Yes, please!
And while we're at it: Just surface the fact that connectivity sucks to applications (maybe even at the socket layer, by just closing them if there's not been any forward progress for a certain time), rather than showing me loading screens that'll never go anywhere for minutes.
This would give apps that do have some offline caching the chance of falling back to that (looking at a certain green music streaming service here).
It is surfaced to apps, but the "just detecting that connectivity sucks" heuristic turns out to be not all that easy to implement. There doesn't seem to be a better heuristic than "try and let the app decide if waited too long".
There are some comments here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/systemconfiguratio...
Almost like it should just be a combo of realized ping + internet speed instead of signal strength
That is literally what i am observing lately with my provider: i have 2 bars and yet i do not have internet, where as my gf, using the same iPhone model, with a different provider, having 2 bars, has perfect data connectivity.
I build apps at the moment, in addition to the phone's network indicators you really should provide your user with visible and live feedback to indicate whether the servers are reachable because there's so many things that can break down in between. Also programming your app for offline-first is good unless it's critically important the information is either live or absent. We allow offline access by using React Query and storing its caches in user storage.
> 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.
The signal strength measurement is actually standardised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_signal#ASU
> 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.
The phone selects a RAT (radio access technology) and frequency for each SIM slot.
After selecting, each SIM slot is subject to inter freq / inter RAT reselection / handover.
Both are controlled by messages received from the tower (e.g. on 4GLTE, for reselection, System Information messages), though there is an additional constraint: what's supported by/enabled in the phone.
Perhaps one SIM slot was in the connected state and the other was in the idle state at one point. So the reselection logic applied for one and the handover logic applied for the other. There is for example a problem called ping pong handover. Once a phone is switched to a different frequency or RAT, the tower may have the phone be sort of stuck in the new frequency, until the conditions of the previous RAT or frequency improve substantially, in order to prevent the phone being like a ping pong ball between the two. This frees resources that would otherwise be spent on repeated handover-related messages.
Each frequency has its own signal strength (free space path loss, transmit power, one frequency might be on one tower and another might be on another, etc).
This is usually for a good reason - dual sim phones are almost always “DSDS”, or “Dual SIM Dual Standby”. The secondary SIM, because it doesn’t need to make a data connection, parks itself on the lowest-frequency (and therefore usually lowest-bandwidth) connection it can find. Meanwhile, your data-connected SIM is busy trying to stream a video or upload your photos, so it’s using a higher-frequency + higher bandwidth connection, resulting in a lower signal strength.
> Meanwhile, your data-connected SIM is busy trying to stream a video or upload your photos
You're making huge and incorrect assumptions here, no? This also happens when your phone is entirely idle... and it randomly changes if you sit still for some time...
Your phone is never idle. Open your adb logs sometime and you'll see that it's doing a ton of stuff all the time. Much of which involves a network connection.
So your phone is basically always doing something, and frequently sending and receiving data when you assume it's doing nothing. By design, radios hop around between channels as conditions change. Another device somewhere outside your house kicked off a big transfer and your device hopper channels to avoid interference. Random atmospheric conditions introduced new noise, or another channel cleared up. This is standard, normal behavior for WiFi, Bluetooth, cellular, and essentially every other type of modern digital radio.
What you're seeing is normal and expected behavior. Modern radios and operating systems are vastly more complex than you're assuming.
How do you know that your phone is entirely idle?
I also have multiple SIMs set to the same network, with sometimes a different amount of bars shown.
I guess the bars aren’t realtime but updates every x seconds? I summed no malice.
> I have no clue how to explain it yet
Android is quiet lazy searching for towers.
I think it has more to do with the cellular modem itself, or precisely the firmware it's running; of which there is much more diversity on the Android side.
As I read this comment on my iPhone 15, I have 1 bar of 5G signal on one esim and 3 bars of signal on the other.
This suggests that the issue is not related to Android.
When we visit downtown of our city, I get great data coverage. My wife, on a different model but same gen iPhone and same plan, gets nothing. Her phone shows three or four bars but her apps won't load anything.
No idea why, especially since I'm the one who installs ad blockers and such. Her phone is essentially stock.
> My wife, on a different model but same gen iPhone and same plan, gets nothing.
Some generations, different Apple models have pretty different radios. Is there a difference in bands or ?
is it perhaps iPhone 16e?
15 Pro Max
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.
There’s no way you earnestly recommend the hot steaming pile of ad-ridden caca I just installed on my phone.
That might be the worst app I’ve used on my iPhone in a year. Better off vibe coding an app to give you signal strength.
Well, there is a paid version (which I didn't try), presumably without ads. As for the Lite version, I don't know exactly why, but ads in this particular app never load on my phone. I see only a black space at the bottom where they supposedly should be visible, but they never load for some reason, without any action from my side. And I think the same happened on my previous phone too, need to check later.
Sorry, I came off too strong since you were just making a recommendation. But man is it bad on iOS.
Just tried the Android version and it was ok.
Does iOS not have built in network signal details?
I don't need to install an app on my Android phone to see my network signal strength. It's kinda hidden though.
Settings->About Phone->Click the sim slot you want to see info for
-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)
Yes, even thermal background noise (the noise level that exists even in complete absence of RF) would be expected to be above -140dBm. It scales with channel size and temperature.
As near as I can tell, the smallest subcarrier 5G can use is 15kHz, the thermal noise floor for a 15kHz channel at room temp (300K) would be -132 dBm.
My guess is whatever chip doing the measurement simply couldn't measure that low accurately, or it reports "nothing detected" as -140 dBm.
GPS receivers can go down to around -160dBm, but that's a very low bitrate signal. Nonetheless it is possible to receive such signals via CDMA techniques.
Reminds me of "The Hunt For Red October" and the sonar consoles "magma displacement" reportings...
Related: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lohttps://www....
"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
fixing link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lo
Thanks. That'll teach me not to proofread.
You know, I don't recall ever seeing 1 bar of signal strength on a smartphone. And once it's down to 2 bars, it barely works, if at all.
Human brains: wow, what a bunch of suckers. Damn.
By the way, is it legal to be deceptive in this way?
> 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
> 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
The mobile networks don't have enough dB and the trains have too much DB?
The boneheaded decision to "privatize" rail by creating a state-owned corporation competing with itself, a network of regional corporations with extremely inconsistent funding and separate corporations for various services like literally maintaining infrastructure definitely has resulted in "too much DB". Although I sincerely doubt attempting to actually open up those "markets" by introducing foreign corporations like National Express really does anything other than cannibalize rail services even further.
I still can't get over the justification for abandoning the €9/month universal ticket experiment (and replacing it with a €49/month offering which has since been bumped to €58/month and will soon be raised to €63/month) officially being in part that "rail will be worse when more people use it" (the other mostly being "not enough people used it to demonstrate its value" and "people used the ticket for trips they otherwise wouldn't have been able to afford to make").
We should just nationalize it all properly and make it free at point of service. Let tourists use it for free too, obviously. Infrastructure exists so the economy can happen, its ROI is a functioning industry and society so stop trying to pretend we can reasonably measure its success in profit.
Sir, with this comment you signed up to auto-renewable two years contract.
For the bargain of 45€ a month. Noncancelable.
Direct debit required, service not guaranteed.
I feel you. We have stellar coverage pretty much everywhere in NL. Heck, I was recently in a work video meeting in the car, not a single drop. The route included part of this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afsluitdijk
Yet, when we visit family in Germany, five minutes after crossing the border we are in a cellular dead zone.
Interesting to see you have a different experience. I'm not sure I would call it stellar. On the train route between Den Haag and Amsterdam, one of the busiest routes in the country presumably, reception is constantly dropping out. I'd love to be able to work on the train, but it's completely impossible if you need a network connection for anything.
Perhaps the route being so busy is the cause of the connectivity issues, but it's still baffling to me how bad it is, given that the amount of mobile devices trying to connect must be very predictable.
+1 on the train, mobile internet in the train is really bad. I kinda get it because you're in a faraday cage, moving between cells quickly, and frequently far outside of inhabited areas but still.
I'm pretty sure the in-train internet also relies on mobile networks, so that's unreliable too. Plus any bandwidth is taken up by people scrolling through tiktok.
But in NL all the trains have WiFi, no?
Germany is a developing country when it comes to broadband let alone wireless internet.
The short version is that the chancellor we had in the 1990s didn't like how the public broadcasting channels were talking about his failures and wanted to push the development of private broadcasters (who being beholden to financial interests rather than objective news coverage mostly spoke favorably of him) by prioritizing cable television over fiber. A surprising number of things came downstream from that pivotal decision, e.g. the completely braindead way we sold frequency bands (which resulted in some literally remaining unused because there were initially no requirements to actually do anything with them).
Moving to Germany from countries where mobile networks function is traumatic. My welcome experience was USB stick with faulty drivers, balance zeroed immediately because of not activated packet, then sipping expensive 1GB data packets over choppy connections. Of course that was all my fault. The only reliable thing was monthly billing and enforcement of contract length by the telecom. When I heard before arrival "there is no internet in the apartment but you can simply buy USB stick" I had subconsciously felt there will be problems. Fuck, I hate these memories so much. Fuck everything about it and everyone involved.
> Highest total GDP in the EU but can't build a mobile network for the life of it.
GDP per capita (or GDP per square metre) would be a more useful indication here. Otherwise, you could throw a bunch of poor countries together--just for purposes of statistics, and expect a better mobile network?
GDP per square metre is probably the best metric, even though it's the more rarely used one. [1] has a neat map of Europe by GDP density.
However Germany is still very high in both GDP per capita and GDP per land area. Roughly on par with the UK, and far higher than France which has a much better mobile network
1: https://ssz.fr/gdp/
> GDP per square metre is probably the best metric, even though it's the more rarely used one. [1] has a neat map of Europe by GDP density.
Well, it would be the best metric, if your country was homogeneously populated.
If everyone lives in one big city and there's literally no one in the rest of the country, then I expect mobile reception (and every other service) to be pretty good for everyone, because they all stay in the big city.
> However Germany is still very high in both GDP per capita and GDP per land area. Roughly on par with the UK, and far higher than France which has a much better mobile network
Yes, France, Germany and UK are all equal enough in these measures (well within an order of magnitude) that the much bigger difference in mobile networks is most likely due to some other factors.
> If everyone lives in one big city and there's literally no one in the rest of the country, then I expect mobile reception (and every other service) to be pretty good for everyone, because they all stay in the big city.
Sometimes the reception is good but the data rate is poor because of too few towers per person, or because the cellphone companies connections to the wider internet are saturated.
Luckily Germany is pretty homogeneously populated. Far more so than the UK (England is pretty even, but Scotland is far emptier) or France (1/5th live in the Paris metro area).
> GDP per square metre is probably the best metric
GDP per square metre only really works for countries with uniform population density. For example, by European standards, Spain is huge, and basically entirely empty outside of a handful of cities...
There are some economics of scale that work best at the country level.
Even with the EU single market, mobile phone operations almost always follow country borders. You'll get a different set of providers in Germany than you'll get one km away on the other side of the Rhine in France. Even though some of them may have the same name or the same ultimate owner or both, and even though you can roam on the other side of the border, you'll have a contract with a different entity, and different people will build and maintain the networking equipment.
Conversely, in the US, the major carriers all have nationwide coverage.
Thing is, mobile networks are national affairs. A bunch of small countries has a lot of small telcos. Germany has 3 (2? not sure with the mergers) large telcos.
I also do, I'm Australian. I regularly experience both congestion caused by tower over-subscription as well as traveling waaaay out into the country where there's no reception, even on the Telstra network that boasts better coverage than everyone else by a mile.
I rarely encounter outright congestion in Australia tbh, but then again I avoid watching videos on the train.. so that's probably indicative of something :D
Coverage is decent on Telstra, but if you're out of town reception is rarely any good, presumably because there's little to no incentive to improve it when there's no on around to need it.
Better coverage may be claimed. But as you know, Australia is a big place.
The few farmers I know have a rough idea of the on-the-ground cell coverage. They say things like "this side of the hill/town" usually. I've seen them deliberately walk to the other side of a silo to make a call.
I assume that the coverage maps are assumed cell-tower-coverage-if-shit-is-not-in-the-way. No surprise radios are common.
A Diné (Navajo) slang word for "cellphone" is "bił nijoobałí" which means "the thing you spin around with". Coverage on rez is not great you see, and in some places is so marginal that whether you get a usable signal depends not just on position but orientation...
> Coverage on rez is not great you see
Tangent but this is a pretty interesting topic. I've heard people speculate that local politics deliberately prevents such infrastructure, waiting for some kind of kickbacks to make it worth their while. Others suggest that it happens because federal telecom subsidies aimed at improving rural connectivity don't apply, as a kind of retaliation for tribal sovereignty. Way off-grid, ok, maybe it's simply not worth it to corporate telecom, but whatever the cause coverage even in fairly populated areas around Kayenta/Monument Valley is also quite bad in a way that would be infrequent in comparable communities in say, nowhere Appalachia.
Many a suburban parent of smart-phone addicted children would romanticize the whole thing and actually be kind of jealous of a situation like that. Years back and on the other side of the world, tourists were very scandalized about more roads and towers around Annapurna in Nepal.. but of course the locals usually do not actually like to be cut off from the world.
More telecom is probably good despite the evils, but fuck commercial billboards in particular. Those are still creeping closer to the Grand Canyons and Yosemites, and they suck whether it's for multinationals like McDonalds, or for locally owned gas stations or hotels that put cash into tribal communities. Ban them all like Hawaii, and everyone will be astonished to learn that the world keeps turning..
Cool: https://endangeredlanguages.com/resource/navajo-word-day-cel...
Humans are strange indeed.
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.
> 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.
A few months ago, I was in a remote area at anchor on a sailboat, about 6.5 miles from the nearest highway through the swamp, with only a few farms and a handful of houses within that radius. With my phone up in the cockpit of the boat and tethered over WiFi to my laptop, I was able to download a movie. As the boat swung on anchor, the download was occasionally interrupted, but when data was flowing it was consistently 5-10 MB/s over a claimed 5G link; the movie downloaded in much less time than its runtime. I assume I wasn't competing with much other traffic on that tower, wherever it was. So my experience was even more binary than yours.
The phone's signal indicator did seem to accurately indicate when it had no usable signal at all, but beyond that I'm not sure it was providing any useful information. And I'm not sure if it could have told me anything of use other than "connected" or "not connected". The very marginal connection was still faster than I had any right to expect for those conditions.
HN is the only website that works on 1 bar. If HN doesn’t load then nothing loads.
SSH also works over crappy connections. It even works reliably when the network went down for minutes.
I had my car break down in remote mountains and that little image had me climb up trees and eventually find a place where I could make a call from. Once I had two bars they could hear me, before that it was the case that they weren't getting what I was transmitting.
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.
At least Home Depot usually provides free WiFi. Until very recently our Costco was a faraday cage with no cell and no WiFi offered.
They finally added WiFi a year ago or so.
I hated having to walk near the doors to send a “was it this” question to the wife.
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.
Wifi-calling to the rescue :)
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.
My house is also like this. No signal on any carrier, and same with one of my neighbors but not neighbor on the opposite side.
Looking at satellite view it is clear that the local municipal water tower is between a huge cell tower near the highway and my house. All carriers seem to lease that same tower only in my area.
It wasn’t like this when I moved in but I guess the carriers consolidated on that big tower near the highway about two years ago.
Radio shadows are a thing I guess.
Rural - I see one bar quite often, and sometimes a call will barely hold on through zero bars (works best if I’m just listening).
But one bar is death for Internet - though HN will often load; anything heavier won’t.
I have one right now and internet is working well enough. Even says lte.
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.
Wish I could post a pic on HN because I’m reading this with one bar. But it’s on iOS. Does Apple just not let carriers do this?
spend some time in rural areas, you will see a one or two bar here and there and sometimes it works, sometimes it is not.
Original commit that introduced the change: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+...
I don't know if I want my name on an open source project attached to a commit whose only purpose is to lie?
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.
> but also all the androids had better margins
That's not something I was expecting to hear
Makes sense that Apple offer lower margins for retailers as it is the stronger brand. Supply and demand. "Oh we wont sell Apple... yeah right!".
But then of course if you can push a customer one way or the other it will be to the higher margin product.
Part of Apple’s high margins is being able to bully retail into taking lower margins. And they sell direct, too.
Yeah they essentially told us that any resellers had to pay retail for Apple products.
I wonder if it’s more intuitive that way.
Like what Apple does with stopwatch.
https://lukashermann.dev/writing/why-the-iphone-timer-displa...
This is just rounding to nearest instead of down or up, not statically adding a whole interval (as the author realizes in an addendum).
My oven always rounds up. Until the last minute, when it immediately switches from 2 minutes to 59 seconds.
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.
Just round up. The countdown is done as soon as 0 appears (0 doesn't linger for 1 second).
To expand a bit on what others have said:
If you're counting up, round down. If you're counting down, round up. A human expects the count to finish at precisely the moment we get to the last number in the sequence (zero, for counting down). Do a count in your head to see what I mean.
Apple chose a compromise by rounding to nearest, for it to "feel good", but you lose the ability to exactly predict when the timer ends as a human. Typical Apple.
It seems easier to use the ceiling
From looking at the bottom of the linked post (which says it was edited, not sure when in relation to your comment), it sounds like they wanted something that worked across arbitrary times split across units (hour/minute/seconds) without having to handle carry-over. I'm not sure I would choose to alter the times themselves over making the math a bit more complex, but the author has obviously thought about this a lot more than me, and it's nice that they at least considered that alternative.
It is still tracking the actual time though.
This signal strength is straight up lying about the actual signal strength
There is a way to switch the bars to actual numeric dBM: https://www.techbout.com/display-iphone-signal-strength-in-n...
(Probably a way to do it on Android, too)
A CSR showed me this while debugging network connectivity issues with my phone.
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.
Is it more common to complain to the carrier about unexpected reception, or unexpected lack thereof?
AT&T sold themselves on More Bars https://www.wired.com/2007/08/att-more-bars-i/
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.
I think you missed important nuance in my comment. Note in my comment I was asking about this mechanism. I'm not suggesting the companies involved wouldn't deceive users. I merely question whether this is how they would do it. It feels way too simple, coarse, obvious/public, and inflexible if the goal is to trick users.
Where are those files stored on my phone? I want to check this for my ISP. Edit: git clone https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Carr... && cd CarrierConfig && grep -rnie inflate
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.
There's a part of me that thinks there's perhaps a logical and reasonable explanation, I just can't think of one.
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.
> a logical and reasonable explanation
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.
That sounds pretty unreasonable to me
Sure, but what was the seemingly plausible reason those sociopaths came up with to get people onboard?
If my boss asks me to do something, and I refuse, what do you imagine will happen? I will get fired for insubordination. It's pretty easy to get people onboard if their paycheck depends on it.
Or you give a note to the regulation authority and your boss gets fired instead.
You'd need to have this specific request from supervisor on paper, with witnesses, all video recorded with supervisor's consent. Otherwise you'd be sued into poverty for besmirching.
When the supervisor fires you, for such a reason, it seemed to be important enough. You also don't need any proof to report someone to the authorities.
Even if the the company has enough lawyers to win in court, it is still expensive. That's why the lawyers are among the risk aversest. So reporting to a company internal lawyer might already be enough.
Employment security of everyone enrolled onboard the current sprint.
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.
One thing you can do is get a femtocell[0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocell
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.
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.
Thank T-Mobile crying to the ITU-R to get 4G and 5G technologies renamed so they could peddle bullshit marketing.
Man, I love my HSPA+ “4G”!
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
https://cs.android.com/android/_/android/platform/frameworks...
Is the commit that added it.
Someone should contact the author and ask for an explanation.
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.
Don’t worry the camera is only on when the green light is on.
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.
In todays world, it advisable to be always wearing nice looking underwear - you just never know when you are being filmed! /s
If the lady in your holiday rental wears matching panties and bra it's not you watching her, she is watching you!
Definitely a clear indication that somethings up in the matrix ;)
Here kitty kitty ...
With Three UK, I have not 1 bar but 5 bars!
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.
How can one hide from git blame?
You can't hide from the pickaxe
gets us the commit [0] from 2020 where config_inflateSignalStrength was renamed to KEY_INFLATE_SIGNAL_STRENGTH_BOOL gets us this commit [1] from 2017 where it was originally added: [0]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+...[1]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+...
The 2017 commit has these code changes:
If the flag is true, bump up BOTH the reported level as well as the total number of bins.If the flag is false, use reported level and default number of bins.
Since both numerator and denominator are bumped up, is it really malicious?
Based on this commit at least, personally, I feel such logic could be due to a decision to shift from levels starting from 0 to levels starting from 1 at the UI level.
Or perhaps to make levels consistent between different operators, some of whom were using 0-based while others used 1-based.
I haven't gone through later commits or latest versions. So my opinion's limited just to this original 2017 change.
> Since both numerator and denominator are bumped up, is it really malicious?
2 bins out of 4 suggests 25%-50%
3 bins out of 5 suggests 40%-60%
`KEY_INFLATE_SIGNAL_STRENGTH_BOOL`
Hm - what is the word 'INFLATE' doing there?
I would like to believe your opinion but that word INFLATE makes it hard ...
If it is a UI correction, then surely it would have had a different name: ENSURE_SIGNAL_IS_ONE_BASED ... ;)
I'm surprised they even display the name and email of the person responsible for doing it. If I were forced to make such a change that I knew would be publicly displayed, I'd do everything possible to disclaim it (such as mentioning the one who actually requested it.)
This has happened before: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Glob...
"I only added the configuration option, I'm not the one enabling it"
"I was only following the orders and it made me famous."
I applaud your inventiveness
(but I still would love to know how does one hide from git blame)
(file renaming?)
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?
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.
contrast with RF emissions which are regulated.
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.
I'm surprised that's not against regulation in a bunch of countries
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:
[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/+/...
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.
> seem to display 3G connections as if they were 4G
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.
The latest iPhone have pushed this to such extremes that it’s become useless as a signal to users.
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
Toggle that off or just remove it entirely.
this is the difference between selling a technology and selling a product
This is the difference between a meaningful comparison and an unmeaningful one.
Ironically this site is struggling due to traffic from HN
Wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20251103013626/https://nickvsnet...
Why is that ironic? Lots of sites struggle with traffic when they hit the front page here.
Because it's about signal strength, but also the hostname is "nick vs networking". And if your site can't handle a few hundred requests per second (which I seriously doubt the HN traffic is anywhere close to) on a static web page, then you're doing something wrong
I assume the irony is that an article about signal strength, which is closely related to data speed, is loading slowly because the site servers have slow data speed.
Crazy how they’d rather fake a stronger signal than actually make it stronger.