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?

> We tried to implement something that matched the most recent iPhone version.

So, game-theoretic evil?

Thats why I experienced 2 bars equals zero internet today?

> 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.

> taking mine to the same areas on the same carrier and doing a comparison

Unfortunately I don't think it's that simple. I've seen one phone simultaneously show significantly different numbers of bars for two SIMs installed in it for the same exact network and operator. After a while they become similar... then differ again... etc.

I have no clue how to explain it yet, but what I do know is that it literally makes no sense with a naive model of how these work, whether you try to explain it as reception or deception.

I highly recommend Network Cell Info Lite app for the network diag. It shows signal strength with all details for each of the SIM modules, shows on a map in real time where are the base station you are currently connected to, and other interesting statistics.

-140 dBm is far beyond no coverage, yeah. -120 dBm is pretty much when LTE stops working (sometimes it can painfully stretch to -123 to -125 but usually not because of noise etc)

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

> 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

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.

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.

Wifi-calling to the rescue :)

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.

Our house is in kind of a hollow despite being in a city, and I (and guests - all networks seem just as bad) get one bar basically all the time at home.

Phone calls are hit-and miss without WiFi calling switched on.

I see it all the time driving through the country. Probably a dozen times just today driving through the american east coast. I agree that two bars is the bare minimum for any functionality though.

I have one right now and internet is working well enough. Even says lte.

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.

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.

> but also all the androids had better margins

That's not something I was expecting to hear

This is just rounding to nearest instead of down or up, not statically adding a whole interval (as the author realizes in an addendum).

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.

It seems easier to use the ceiling

It is still tracking the actual time though.

This signal strength is straight up lying about the actual signal strength

AT&T sold themselves on More Bars https://www.wired.com/2007/08/att-more-bars-i/

Is it more common to complain to the carrier about unexpected reception, or unexpected lack thereof?

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.

Someone should contact the author and ask for an explanation.

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.

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

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.

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.

You can't hide from the pickaxe

    $ git log --oneline -SKEY_INFLATE_SIGNAL_STRENGTH_BOOL | tail

    $ git log --oneline -Sconfig_inflateSignalStrength | tail

    43c14d198479 Add config to artificially inflate number of bars

[1]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+...

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.

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.

This is the difference between a meaningful comparison and an unmeaningful one.

Why is that ironic? Lots of sites struggle with traffic when they hit the front page here.