

Why "More Bars in More Places" means shit for nothing now - indiekid
http://mgalligan.com/post/19305171440/why-more-bars-in-more-places-means-shit-for-nothing

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sbierwagen

      What we need is something that indicates network quality. This would be 
      a third indicator (or replacing the two previous ones). It would 
      indicate the level of service that one could expect while on a cellular 
      band.
    

Whoops, physics!

The current signal indicator is based on the periodic heartbeat packets the
phone broadcasts. This is the bare minimum for a cell phone to work at all: in
order to route a call to a phone, the network has to know which cell it's in.

A "network quality" metric would require, say, a ping running to a host a
couple hops away. This requires using the radio to actually transmit
nontrivial amounts of data, and (depending on a whole lot of things, of
course) more often than the heartbeat.

This would kill battery life. Absolutely murder it. You'd go from 200 hours of
standby to 50. Maybe less.

Even worse if you wanted to get an idea of throughput. You'd have to transmit,
say, a hundred megabytes of random data. Now we're down to 20 hours of
"standby", and dramatically higher load on the backhaul. And, of course, li-on
batteries die quicker the more heavily you use them, and the iPhone doesn't
have a user-serviceable battery.

~~~
indiekid
Or it could just piggyback the existing connections that are taking place. It
could run metrics against every attempted outgoing or incoming transfer. This
would include mail checks, notifications, or any in-app data use. Sure, it
wouldn't be "real time" if I pick up my phone "cold" but even just
piggybacking on mail checks would make it work pretty well.

~~~
sbierwagen
Since we already know that the mail client doesn't kill the battery dead, we
can guess it's not checking for mail very often.

Sure enough, google tells us the _most frequent check possible_ is 15 minutes:
[https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1596018?start=0&tst...](https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1596018?start=0&tstart=0)

You could use the entire network stack, sure, but that still isn't going to be
very fast, since any app that uses the radio frequently is going to drain the
battery, and users will complain, which mean such apps just don't exist.

You can settle for only getting an idea of how useful the network is once
every 10 minutes, but then we're back at the problem of the "network quality"
metric not actually _meaning_ anything relevant.

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bshep
Does anyone know of a Cydia app that will give a more meaningful or network
quality signal bar as the article suggests?

~~~
jasomill
No, but there's a switchable "bars"/dBm display built in to recent versions of
iOS: 1\. Dial #3001#12345#* and hit send to start the Field Test app. 2\. Hold
down the power/lock button until the "slide to power off" screen displays. 3\.
Hold down the Home button to force-quit the Field Test app. 4\. A numeric dBm
value now displays in place of "bars", and you can toggle the display by
tapping it.

This behavior persists until you re-enter and gracefully quit the Field Test
app.

~~~
bradleyland
Just a minor correction for anyone trying this out. The correct field test
mode number is _3001#12345#_. This must be dialed from the keypad. It won't
work from the address book.

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garyrichardson
I had never had problems in Canada on my iPhone with my provider. I could in
fact take an elevator ride 2 stories into the basement and continue a call. I
recently moved from one suburb of Vancouver, BC to another and all that
changed.

At the new neighbourhood I couldn't get service standing at my front door
about a mile in line of sight of the nearest tower. After a long and ugly
fight with the provider, I was able to cancel my service for half the ETF and
move to another provider using an iPhone that I presume connects to the same
towers and works as expected. I definitely wasn't happy with the result.

I've noticed that the 5 bar system does not work well for diagnosing actual
signal strength and reliability: the display updates too slowly to be of
actual use when signal is a problem -- watch people waive their phones around
while they try and make them work. The bars don't represent the signal it's
getting now, but some normalized value of the last little bit of signal.

At minimum, it would be nice to have an app that does a good job of diagnosing
and explaining your current network situation. I'm sure it already exists, I'm
just not aware of it.

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yellowbkpk
Android users with a Google account added to their phone should know that the
color of their signal bars will change depending on the status of their
connection to Google. Android keeps a connection open to Google for various
reasons (push notifications, e-mail sync, etc.). If this connection goes away
for some reason (like, say, if your provider doesn't have any bandwidth left
for you), the connection bars will change to grey.

It's not fool proof, but it's better than nothing.

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bunderbunder
It means extra shit for nothing in downtown Chicago, where folks with an
iPhone 4S get 4 bars of "4G", but can't even send or receive email.

~~~
lbotos
Does anyone know why the 4S has been showing "4G" bars recently?

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danilocampos
So glad to read someone pointing this out. It's especially maddening on
Caltrain, where you're trapped with a group of data-hungry, bored commuters.
Even with five bars, network responsiveness is a crapshoot and the severity of
the problem is completely opaque.

~~~
rachelbythebay
This kind of talk makes me want to build a box which does wifi on one end and
something more reliable than cell service on the other, routing between the
two. Then I'd just ride the trains all day with it in my bag and sell access
to anyone who jumps on.

Think of it as the homeless hotspot thing from SxSW, only brought to the
peninsula. One person per train would probably do the trick.

The hardest part is: just how do you get reliable connectivity to your box in
order to resell it?

~~~
sbierwagen
<http://www.liveu.tv/lu60_series.html>

Summary: uses a bunch of different 4G cards from different carriers, large
high gain antennas, and link aggregation; to make a single reliable network
connection from a bunch of unreliable ones.

Downside: Fills a backpack, is really thrillingly expensive.

~~~
rachelbythebay
Nice! I bet you could make the money back, given sufficient demand (and this
is not the first I've heard about sketchy service). Maybe just doing it on the
baby bullets daily would get the job done.

I imagine you could probably test the waters by running an open AP with a
suitable name and have a small web server behind it which lets people indicate
their interest. Ride with it for a few days, wear the name of the network on
your clothing, and see what happens.

