7 ms·
Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength
- metadat 11mo agoYou 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?
- eqvinox 11mo ago> 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
- samplatt 11mo agoI 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.
- _carbyau_ 11mo agoBetter 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.
- bitwize 11mo agoA 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...
- robot-wrangler 11mo ago> 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..
- rendall 11mo agoCool: https://endangeredlanguages.com/resource/navajo-word-day-cell-phone https://endangeredlanguages.com/resource/navajo-word-day-cel...
- Panzer04 11mo agoI 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.
- lifestyleguru 11mo agoMoving 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.
- eru 11mo ago> 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?
- dmurray 11mo agoThere 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.
- wongarsu 11mo agoGDP 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/ https://ssz.fr/gdp/
- eru 11mo ago> 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.
- JoshTriplett 11mo ago> 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?
- lifestyleguru 11mo agoSir, with this comment you signed up to auto-renewable two years contract.
- fransje26 11mo agoFor the bargain of 45€ a month. Noncancelable.
- lifestyleguru 11mo agoDirect debit required, service not guaranteed.
- hnbad 11mo agoThe 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.
- microtonal 11mo agoI 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 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.
- kmm 11mo agoInteresting 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.
- Cthulhu_ 11mo ago+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.
- janandonly 11mo agoBut in NL all the trains have WiFi, no?
- hnbad 11mo agoGermany 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).
- MangoToupe 11mo agoI 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.
- tiznow 11mo agoConsider 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.
- ssl-3 11mo agoHumans 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.
- Affric 11mo agoI 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.
- wtallis 11mo ago> 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.
- 3eb7988a1663 11mo agoHeh, 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.
- jmspring 11mo agospend some time in rural areas, you will see a one or two bar here and there and sometimes it works, sometimes it is not.
- tzs 11mo agoTry 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.
- bombcar 11mo agoAt 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.
- dawnerd 11mo agoI have one right now and internet is working well enough. Even says lte.
- pants2 11mo agoI 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.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- Yizahi 11mo agoAndroid 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 :)
- davemp 11mo agoI’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.
- bombcar 11mo agoRural - 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.
- mattmaroon 11mo agoWish 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?
- jrmg 11mo agoOur 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.
- tatersolid 11mo agoMy 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.
- lxgr 11mo agoFor 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).
- NoPicklez 11mo agoThere's a part of me that thinks there's perhaps a logical and reasonable explanation, I just can't think of one.
- kouteiheika 11mo ago> 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.
- alexanderjchun 11mo agoSure, but what was the seemingly plausible reason those sociopaths came up with to get people onboard?
- lifestyleguru 11mo agoEmployment security of everyone enrolled onboard the current sprint.
- kouteiheika 11mo agoIf 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.
- 1718627440 11mo agoOr you give a note to the regulation authority and your boss gets fired instead.
- lifestyleguru 11mo agoYou'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.
- doctorpangloss 11mo agothis is the difference between selling a technology and selling a product
- jb1991 11mo agoThis is the difference between a meaningful comparison and an unmeaningful one.
- jwrallie 11mo agoThat 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.
- alberth 11mo agoI wonder if it’s more intuitive that way. Like what Apple does with stopwatch. https://lukashermann.dev/writing/why-the-iphone-timer-displays-fake-time/ https://lukashermann.dev/writing/why-the-iphone-timer-displa...
- happytoexplain 11mo agoThis is just rounding to nearest instead of down or up, not statically adding a whole interval (as the author realizes in an addendum).
- Thorrez 11mo agoMy oven always rounds up. Until the last minute, when it immediately switches from 2 minutes to 59 seconds.
- godelski 11mo agoIt seems easier to use the ceiling
- saghm 11mo agoFrom 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.
- kybernetyk 11mo agoHeh, 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.
- NooneAtAll3 11mo agoHow can one hide from git blame?
- TheDong 11mo agoYou can't hide from the pickaxe $ git log --oneline -SKEY_INFLATE_SIGNAL_STRENGTH_BOOL | tail gets us the commit [0] from 2020 where config_inflateSignalStrength was renamed to KEY_INFLATE_SIGNAL_STRENGTH_BOOL $ git log --oneline -Sconfig_inflateSignalStrength | tail gets us this commit [1] from 2017 where it was originally added: 43c14d198479 Add config to artificially inflate number of bars [0]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+/eee4e50a20ab https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+... [1]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+/43c14d198479 https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+...
- userbinator 11mo agoI'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.)
- lifestyleguru 11mo ago"I was only following the orders and it made me famous."
- integralid 11mo ago"I only added the configuration option, I'm not the one enabling it"
- saagarjha 11mo agoThis has happened before: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/GlobalSearch/+/592150ac00086400415afe936d96f04d3be3ba0c https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Glob...
- sammy2255 11mo agoIronically this site is struggling due to traffic from HN Wayback machine link: https://web.archive.org/web/20251103013626/https://nickvsnetworking.com/simple-trick-to-increase-coverage-lying-to-users-about-signal-strength/ https://web.archive.org/web/20251103013626/https://nickvsnet...
- jb1991 11mo agoWhy is that ironic? Lots of sites struggle with traffic when they hit the front page here.
- ethmarks 11mo agoI 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.
- sammy2255 11mo agoBecause 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
- sanex 11mo agoIIRC 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.
- SkiFire13 11mo ago> but also all the androids had better margins That's not something I was expecting to hear
- hshdhdhehd 11mo agoMakes 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.
- bombcar 11mo agoPart of Apple’s high margins is being able to bully retail into taking lower margins. And they sell direct, too.
- sanex 11mo agoYeah they essentially told us that any resellers had to pay retail for Apple products.
- ggm 11mo agocontrast 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
- charcircuit 11mo agohttps://cs.android.com/android/_/android/platform/frameworks/base/+/43c14d19847993aa603b781f6bc55efb273fa3fd https://cs.android.com/android/_/android/platform/frameworks... Is the commit that added it.
- sharts 11mo agoSomeone should contact the author and ask for an explanation.
- horizonVelox999 11mo agoCrazy how they’d rather fake a stronger signal than actually make it stronger.
- Towaway69 11mo agoDon’t worry the camera is only on when the green light is on.
- lifestyleguru 11mo agoIn 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.
- Towaway69 11mo agoIn todays world, it advisable to be always wearing nice looking underwear - you just never know when you are being filmed! /s
- lifestyleguru 11mo agoIf the lady in your holiday rental wears matching panties and bra it's not you watching her, she is watching you!
- Towaway69 11mo agoDefinitely a clear indication that somethings up in the matrix ;) Here kitty kitty ...
- userbinator 11mo agoA 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_signal#ASU
- dataflow 11mo ago> 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.
- hulitu 11mo ago> I have no clue how to explain it yet Android is quiet lazy searching for towers.
- devmor 11mo agoAs 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.
- brewdad 11mo agoWhen 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.
- instagib 11mo agoI 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.
- justahuman74 11mo agoI'm surprised that's not against regulation in a bunch of countries
- zabumafu 11mo agoI 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.
- hshdhdhehd 11mo agoThats why I experienced 2 bars equals zero internet today?
- xfactorial 11mo agoThat 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.
- dawnerd 11mo agoBars 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.
- dataflow 11mo agoIs 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.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 11mo agoThink 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.
- dataflow 11mo agoI 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.
- userbinator 11mo agoIs it more common to complain to the carrier about unexpected reception, or unexpected lack thereof?
- Maxious 11mo agoAT&T sold themselves on More Bars https://www.wired.com/2007/08/att-more-bars-i/ https://www.wired.com/2007/08/att-more-bars-i/
- modeless 11mo agoI 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.
- moribvndvs 11mo agoMaybe 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.
- Shank 11mo agoSignal 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.
- jesprenj 11mo agoWhere 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/CarrierConfig https://android.googlesource.com/platform/packages/apps/Carr... && cd CarrierConfig && grep -rnie inflate
- NotMelNoGuitars 11mo agoPoking 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: $ grep -r show_4g_for_3g_data_icon_bool assets/ assets/carrier_config_carrierid_1187_AT&T.xml: <boolean name="show_4g_for_3g_data_icon_bool" value="true"/> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_2119_FirstNet.xml: <boolean name="show_4g_for_3g_data_icon_bool" value="true"/> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_1779_Cricket-Wireless.xml: <boolean name="show_4g_for_3g_data_icon_bool" value="true"/> 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: $ grep -r _thresholds_int_array assets/ -A5 assets/carrier_config_carrierid_2556_Xfinity_Mobile.xml: <int-array name="lte_rsrp_thresholds_int_array" num="4"> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_2556_Xfinity_Mobile.xml- <item value="-115"/> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_2556_Xfinity_Mobile.xml- <item value="-105"/> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_2556_Xfinity_Mobile.xml- <item value="-95"/> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_2556_Xfinity_Mobile.xml- <item value="-85"/> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_2556_Xfinity_Mobile.xml- </int-array> -- assets/carrier_config_carrierid_1345_Telstra.xml: <int-array name="lte_rsrp_thresholds_int_array" num="4"> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_1345_Telstra.xml- <item value="-120"/> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_1345_Telstra.xml- <item value="-115"/> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_1345_Telstra.xml- <item value="-100"/> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_1345_Telstra.xml- <item value="-90"/> assets/carrier_config_carrierid_1345_Telstra.xml- </int-array> -- assets/carrier_config_carrierid_1839_Verizon-Wireless.xml: # omitted, same as Xfinity, above ... -- assets/carrier_config_carrierid_2032_Xfinity-Mobile.xml: # omitted, same as Xfinity, above ... [0]: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/CarrierConfigManager#KEY_SHOW_4G_FOR_3G_DATA_ICON_BOOL https://developer.android.com/reference/android/telephony/Ca... [1]: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/signal-strength#implement https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/signal-strength... [2]: https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/refs/heads/master/telephony/java/android/telephony/CarrierConfigManager.java#11103 https://android.googlesource.com/platform/frameworks/base/+/... sDefaults.putIntArray(KEY_LTE_RSRP_THRESHOLDS_INT_ARRAY, // Boundaries: [-140 dBm, -44 dBm] new int[] { -128, /* SIGNAL_STRENGTH_POOR */ -118, /* SIGNAL_STRENGTH_MODERATE */ -108, /* SIGNAL_STRENGTH_GOOD */ -98, /* SIGNAL_STRENGTH_GREAT */ });
- sharts 11mo agoToggle that off or just remove it entirely.
- Leftium 11mo agoThere is a way to switch the bars to actual numeric dBM: https://www.techbout.com/display-iphone-signal-strength-in-numbers-7346/ 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.
- ashirviskas 11mo agoIf 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.
- kotaKat 11mo agoThank 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”!
- MaxL93 11mo agoTechnically 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
- Havoc 11mo agoThe 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
- 2dvisio 11mo agoWith 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!
- mijoharas 11mo agoOne thing you can do is get a femtocell[0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocell https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femtocell
- navigate8310 11mo agoWiFi 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.
- tim333 11mo agoI'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.
- gadders 11mo agoRelated: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lohttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lo 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"
- Cthulhu_ 11mo agoI 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.
- crtasm 11mo agofixing link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lo https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lo
- gadders 11mo agoThanks. That'll teach me not to proofread.
- lxgr 11mo agoAt 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 https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/5g-nsa
- jlokier 11mo agoWith 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.
- lxgr 11mo agoAre 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.
- OptionOfT 11mo agoOriginal commit that introduced the change: https://android.googlesource.com/platform//frameworks/base/+/43c14d19847993aa603b781f6bc55efb273fa3fd 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?
- wolfd 11mo agoI 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.
- explosion-s 11mo agoHaving 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?
- foresto 11mo agoAndroid 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.