

Four bars? The disconnect between bars and cell signal - nick5768
http://arstechnica.com/articles/paedia/cell-bars-reception.ars

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iigs
Reading uneducated users opinions about signal meters ("phone A is better
because it has one more bar than phone B") gives me that same sad feeling
about humanity that talking about politics with "low information voters" does.
It makes me wonder how stupid I am in areas that I don't understand very well
(say, chemistry or medicine).

I've had the fairly unusual experience of getting to sit in meetings about
controlling the display of signal bars. It's interesting because you're doing
a bunch of fairly complex math on real phenomena (signal level, noise floor,
corrupt symbols or low level frames, and so on) to turn it into one of six
messages to a human being, without any words. If you deflate the value (too
few "bars") you get dissatisfied customers -- they think that your service
sucks because they've never seen more than three bars, even on a sunny day. On
the other hand, if you inflate the number, you end up with a lot of support
calls -- people that have five bars and bad voice quality or slow performance.

Basically, I gathered that the messages that the bars convey to the user are:

0) The device can't see the tower or would be unable to place a call/data
connection.

1-2) The device is on the network and believes it can perform but the user
should expect degraded performance or connection failures.

3) The connection should be OK and performance should be up to advertised
specification (full speed, no drops), but you aren't getting the best signal
possible, and should pay attention as it could drop from here.

4-5) Your signal is very healthy and you shouldn't expect anything better than
this. It most certainly won't be a problem for you.

I'm kind of surprised, given the marketing push for "bars" in the cell
industry that we don't have 7+ bar signal displays these days -- it would be a
pretty safe way to give more bars without actually compromising the underlying
message. I was pleasantly surprised when I saw an iPod with a battery meter
that was calculated to the pixel (a smooth bar, not three simulated LCD
segments) -- it removes the ability to complain about being down "a bar" after
listening to M songs when someone used to get N songs -- completely
unscientific but the basis for tons of bad press about battery life. I'm
surprised no one has tried this on mobile signal (that I know of).

~~~
maw
_Reading uneducated users opinions about signal meters ("phone A is better
because it has one more bar than phone B")_

Come on! Who wouldn't want a phone that goes to eleven?

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OneSeventeen
Wow... I would so much rather just have (perhaps a subset of) the actual data
always on my display. I don't have an iPhone, but there's some room on my
little screen that could show -90 when I'm in a cave and, like, -9 most of the
time (or whatever it may be).

Seriously, people, are we supposed to be so dumb that we can't do that kind of
judgment call on our own? I thought that that kind of thing was what the human
mind was supposed to be good at and that computers are supposed to be bad at,
yet here we are having a phone do it for us?

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nick5768
A very readable article about what goes into the bars on your cell phone. I
liked it especially because it doesn't jump on the "OMG ATT/VERIZON/WHOMEVER
IS THE DEVIL" bandwagon that seems so popular on the internet.

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nazgulnarsil
the map is not the territory. anytime you have people associate a positive
with some arbitrary measure, the people controlling that measure have an
incentive to inflate it. this makes it appear that they are improving things
while doing nothing. see: the economy, public schooling, housing, etc.

