Experimenting with modems to try and find a better one and came across something very irritating. It seems after my testing that the number of bars of signal and the signal strength reported in Network Signal Info seem to have no relation what so ever to the 4g data speed you may get.
Earlier I was testing with 4 out of 6 bars of signal, NSI showing 94dbm and something like 60% signal.....and I consistently got speed tests of around 1mbps or less and even that was slow and stuttery. On other occasions with only a 40% signal at 106dbm in NSI I was able to get 22mbps in speed tests. All these tests were done using the same speedtest server as well as subjective testing by running various apps and seeing how quick or slow they were (and the performance of all the apps matched the performance of the download tests). So what the hell is going on? It looks like signal strength has nothing to do with the 4g connection speeds.
Is the signal strength even indicating the strength of the 4g signal or is it merely indicating the strength of the phone signal because that's what it kinda looks like.
I am on EE UK with their 'double speed' 4g (which gives me 97.5mbps download when at home with a perfect signal).
ewokuk said:
Experimenting with modems to try and find a better one and came across something very irritating. It seems after my testing that the number of bars of signal and the signal strength reported in Network Signal Info seem to have no relation what so ever to the 4g data speed you may get.
Earlier I was testing with 4 out of 6 bars of signal, NSI showing 94dbm and something like 60% signal.....and I consistently got speed tests of around 1mbps or less and even that was slow and stuttery. On other occasions with only a 40% signal at 106dbm in NSI I was able to get 22mbps in speed tests. All these tests were done using the same speedtest server as well as subjective testing by running various apps and seeing how quick or slow they were (and the performance of all the apps matched the performance of the download tests). So what the hell is going on? It looks like signal strength has nothing to do with the 4g connection speeds.
Is the signal strength even indicating the strength of the 4g signal or is it merely indicating the strength of the phone signal because that's what it kinda looks like.
I am on EE UK with their 'double speed' 4g (which gives me 97.5mbps download when at home with a perfect signal).
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Yes, in fact the signal strength and data speed are different things and they do (most likely) not affect to each other.
By detailed, signal strength is depend on if you are far or near from the mobile tower.
While data speed depend on many other factors: max capability of the network, your subscription with the service provider, and the congestion on the network.
The signal strength will also impact on data speed, but only when you are very far from the tower, when the signal strength is very weak. That may impact the data speed.
Exactly what I was afraid of. This would mean it is not even possible to test how good your signal is (for data) without running endless speed tests (which are going to kill your data usage in no time). There is no other way to test data strength?
ewokuk said:
Exactly what I was afraid of. This would mean it is not even possible to test how good your signal is (for data) without running endless speed tests (which are going to kill your data usage in no time). There is no other way to test data strength?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The term "data strength" has no meaning. If you want to test for signal strength, it is the received level. If you want to test for data speed, there is no way without actually testing it.
Sent from my SM-N9005 using Tapatalk
Related
I hate to say it but I am having 3g issues. By that I mean no 3g and one to two bars. Usually I have perfect reception.
Sent from my ADR6300 using the XDA mobile application powered by Tapatalk
i've noticed on the incredible that my displayed signal strength isn't as strong as it is on my droid. haven't noticed a difference in call reception or data speeds though...yet.
Eris users have noticed the same thing as you bzbz when compared to the Droid. Could be the cpu or something else HTC vs Motorola.
i've noticed on the incredible that my displayed signal strength isn't as strong as it is on my droid. haven't noticed a difference in call reception or data speeds though...yet.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I noticed the same thing but my download/upload speeds are just as fast if not faster. I gave my Droid to my mom and took her upgrade so I have both side by side, off WiFi downloading a movie and the Incredible is actually 20-50kbs faster than my old Droid and yes the Droid is over clocked with petes 1ghz kernel.
I have had the Incredible for a couple of days, and I've noticed a lower displayed signal strength than I'd see on my Droid in the same locations.
But I've not experienced any reception issues, and my internet speed seems the same or faster.
This is what I expected. We all know that you can't count on those reception bars to compare different phones, and also that Moto tends to have better radios/reception than everyone else anyway. As long as you're phone's radio is close to Moto's in the ability to make/receive calls, then normally you're not doing bad.
well it's good to know that the signal strength concern may be more of a "cosmetic" issue than a legitimate performance issue.
daftlush said:
I hate to say it but I am having 3g issues. By that I mean no 3g and one to two bars. Usually I have perfect reception.
Sent from my ADR6300 using the XDA mobile application powered by Tapatalk
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
how is the quality on said reception? Other people's replies seem to indicate good quality even with less bars.
BzBz said:
well it's good to know that the signal strength concern may be more of a "cosmetic" issue than a legitimate performance issue.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This...
It is definitely cosmetic, the newest radio i have installed on my eris does the same. The reception on my eris is better then my friends with the older radio, but he has more 3G bars.
designerfx said:
how is the quality on said reception? Other people's replies seem to indicate good quality even with less bars.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It may just be the way HTC displays the signal. I know on the Touch Pro 2 and Touch Pro, the signal indicator frequently shows incorrect (lower) signal strength but works fine.
I compared signal strength between my BB Curve 8330 and my new Incredible.
In spite of the indicated signal strength being lower on the Incredible, the dBm was the same. It's only one location and one user, but I suspect it's not an actual signal strength issue.
i used my incredible all day. i work in a downtown area with many tall building surrounded and i still got a good 3g signal and speed.
from Boston.
the 3G speeds on my incredible are slower that my 2G G1 running on AT&T. i get les than 200 kbps downstream. My friend with a droid standing in the same room will get aound 1100 Kbps. What gives??
if you are haveing a tough time with a signal.. I update my roaming towers... I had an issue today where I couldn't get much.. I did *228 option 2 and it updated my roaming towers and have had no problems since... sometimes you need to do that with a new phone so it knows exactly what towers to look for
tried the *228 to update. Update was successful but no improvment. still have very slow data speeds and terrible call quality. reception stays about around -100 dBm
I'm also noticing what appears to be poor reception. I was getting better reception with my Droid than I am with Incredible. I've tried the *228 last night and this morning but that hasn't helped. Hopefully there will eventually be some kind of software fix for this. I'm seeing other threads on other sites with the same kind of complaints so I don't think it's a select few who are experiencing this issue.
hoop762 said:
the 3G speeds on my incredible are slower that my 2G G1 running on AT&T. i get les than 200 kbps downstream. My friend with a droid standing in the same room will get aound 1100 Kbps. What gives??
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Your speed will depend on what tower your connected to. on my Eris, I've gone from 1mbps/0.70mbps in New York, NY to 2mbps/2mbps in West Haven, CT. It's not the phone. The newer radio on the Incredible will show less bars, but your signal strength will be fine .(dBm)
My phone keeps dropping 3G my droid never has done this in the location the incredible is. I will go into airplane mode then back out and I will have 3g again
Over at Androidforums there is a thread going regarding reception issues. On page 2 is some help in running a debug on the phone that will give you dbm levels and some other info. I'm not sure how to use the info the debug gives but perhaps it may be of some use to someone here.
The link is http://androidforums.com/htc-incredible/70223-weak-signal-strength.html
rckeystone said:
Over at Androidforums there is a thread going regarding reception issues. On page 2 is some help in running a debug on the phone that will give you dbm levels and some other info. I'm not sure how to use the info the debug gives but perhaps it may be of some use to someone here.
The link is http://androidforums.com/htc-incredible/70223-weak-signal-strength.html
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You don't need to go into field test mode like this guy said, all you need to do is from the home screen > menu > setting > about phone > network.
Here you will see signal strength (typical between -100 to -80dBm) the closer to 0 you are the better your signal is (ie: 80dBm > 90dBm)
Hope that clears up some confusion. I've tested both the motodroid and the incredible side by side in a location with low signal and can say that my incredible gets better signal than the droid, even though the "bars" don't indicate as such.
my signal always stays at -81, is that a good thing?
im a new android and 3g user
So I just recently took a trip from northern California to Tennessee and had some interesting results with the Froyo radio. For reference I own the ATT-version Nexus One and have data roaming enabled.
When I used the phone before Froyo radio I had many problems with the 3G switching to Edge and back when needed which caused random data dropouts. Even turning the phone off and back wouldn't force the phone to switch connections to Edge when needed which would make me very frustrated in times of need.
On my trip I found something very interesting, not only did 3G and Edge switch almost perfectly, but Edge performed MUCH faster than before. While it isn't as important now in a world of 3G coverage, when I was on the "edge" of civilization I still got surfing speeds that were not far behind that of 3G speeds. My browsing, and most importantly Google Maps usage rarely suffered a performance hit despite where I was or what type of connection was available to my phone.
There was a difference between performance; 3G would act like Comcast and Edge would be a little behind, but in terms of actually surfing the Internet the extra 2-5 seconds it took to load up a desktop webpage didn't make a difference.
Technically the bandwidth speeds were much different. 3G performed from 1 to a max of 2 megabits down and .3-1 megabits up, while Edge showed speeds of 300-500 kbps down and 100-200 up.
One thing I did notice throughout the trip is the Nexus One's signal meter did not report correctly, there were times where it showed no signal and I had super fast connection, and also times when it would show full or near-full bars and there was no connection.
Hope someone finds this info useful!!! I'm very happy with the coverage my Nexus One gets with the Froyo radio now!
I have always found that my nexus holds calls and has fast data showing zero bars. One reason I've always loved the nexus
Just a point of clarification, EDGE has a maximum theoretical bandwidth of 473.6 kbits/s for 8 timeslots.
In real world conditions EDGE should have throughput of 236.8kbit/s with 4 timeslots(which is what most carriers employ).
Dan
Wonder if there's and app/mod to replace the signal bar with the actual signal #s?
Hey Sellitus, what else did you find working/not working on that trip?
I am considering a longer drive (SF to NY) and want to know about battery life, apps that were really handy, and which weren't.
SiNJiN76 said:
Wonder if there's and app/mod to replace the signal bar with the actual signal #s?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
hey that would be nice. just like how cyanogen puts the battery percentage, it would be nice to have the dBm level of signal overtop of the signal meter.
RogerPodacter said:
hey that would be nice. just like how cyanogen puts the battery percentage, it would be nice to have the dBm level of signal overtop of the signal meter.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The dBm and signal bar IMO opinion are rather pointless in regards to data. Having a very poor 3G signal will always be faster than a full GPRS signal.
Also, a signal meter in terms of DB would jump around quite a bit...
sprinkles said:
Hey Sellitus, what else did you find working/not working on that trip?
I am considering a longer drive (SF to NY) and want to know about battery life, apps that were really handy, and which weren't.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well for ATT I hit data roaming quite a few times, and although it worked on edge pretty quickly during those times it would randomly drop when the R was showing randomly. I think what happened a lot on the trip is when I was out in the middle of nowhere bouncing between towers would cause random dropouts, but they were usually no more than a few seconds.
I don't remember which apps specifically though a few also did not like the trip, but most would hang and resume in a few seconds after data was reconnected even if the signal strength showed it was connected the entire time with signal. Sometimes Google Maps hung, though it was rare and I noticed it more because I used it near constantly on the trip.
If I were to give advice to anyone looking at a cross country trip, buy a map or get offline GPS maps to help. We bought a map and it proved valuable at times, though we rarely needed it.
I wonder if the "enable data while roaming" setting had anything to do with that. Maybe an internal bug.
torchedlh said:
Also, a signal meter in terms of DB would jump around quite a bit...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't know how a number jumping around would be any different than a graphical signal meter jumping around. The iPhone has had this hack for a long time where you can replace the signal meter with the dBm reading. Though I've never owned the iPhone, but seen it on friend's iPhone before.
I know I'm often going into the android settings to look at my dBm reading, didn't jump around too much for me to see.
I've been having some reception issue lately with AT&T around my hometown (usually its quite good),so I did some googling, and found plenty of info on radio signal, and how to interpret -dBm, but I'm still baffled by the ASU. I really couldn't find much, just some random post on a random forum that left me with some questions:
In a 3G network your cell phone tries to open three channels to three radios so they can locate you and hand you off properly.
Those three channels make up you ACTIVE SET.
ASU is ACTIVE SET UPDATES or the rate at which your phone is able to update its location to the towers/radios.
This rate is affected by signal strength, load, and probably a lot of other factors that I haven't puzzled out yet.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Can anyone shed some more light on this? Usually at home I have 2 bars of HSDPA, somehwere in the -90s dBm, and anywhere from 4-8 asu.
Posted this in the Fascinate forum, but I'd like to know if it is affecting your devices as well:
I believe there is a bug in the signal strength indication on the Fascinate, the one that shows the signal strength in -dBm.
You can see the signal strength of the cell signal on the Menu, Settings, About, Status screen. Or you can place a widget on your Home screen. There are several widgets available, I'm using Mobile Signal Widget.
I have a network extender, which basically creates a cell tower right in your home. With my Motorola Droid, I used to get signal strengths down to about -50 something and 60's in indicated signal strength. I can hold both of our Fascinates right next to the network extender's antenna and they will read no better than -86 dBm. So far I've seen signal strengths from -86 dBm to -106 dBm (terrible).
I believe there is a bug in the software (Baseband) on the Fascinate. Previously, I thought the hardware (antenna/radio) wasn't very good, but now it may be software related.
Has anyone seen a signal strength stronger than -86 dBm on the Fascinate/Epic?
I remember seeing it at -68 dBm on my Epic yesterday.
Hmm, thanks for that. Was that on 3G?
I also feel that this is impacting battery life. My signal is always reading worse than the Evo and TP2 (in the same location) but calls are not dropped.
This leads me to believe that the signal is actually better than the phone thinks. but since the phone thinks the signal is weaker than it is, it boosts the radio power (thus eating more battery.)
If this is not the case, the flip side is much worse and the Epic's antenna is a poor design, requiring higher power.
Every phone that Samsung comes out with that runs Android and the QSC6085 modem processor always has the same general problems.
The Fascinate, Epic 4G, Moment, Intercept, and Acclaim all generally have poor battery life, signal, GPS, and network performance issues, and other related bugs.
I know of other phones like the Droid/X/2 that have the same Qualcomm modem and have no issues whatsoever with network and GPS connectivity.
Is there any way to get source for the Droid phones and fix what's wrong on the Epic?
Thanks for all the replies. Verizon CS wasn't any help, at least the one Guy that responded to my email that I sent them.
LOL. He told me I have to contact the developer of the signal strength app I had on my phone for the problem I was reporting. WTF?
I responded by asking him to send it to higher level technical support personnel.
We'll see how that goes.
In the meantime, I'll probably exchange my Fascinate for a Droid X to get a phone with better reception, GPS function, and network performance.
xliderider said:
Posted this in the Fascinate forum, but I'd like to know if it is affecting your devices as well:
I believe there is a bug in the signal strength indication on the Fascinate, the one that shows the signal strength in -dBm.
You can see the signal strength of the cell signal on the Menu, Settings, About, Status screen. Or you can place a widget on your Home screen. There are several widgets available, I'm using Mobile Signal Widget.
I have a network extender, which basically creates a cell tower right in your home. With my Motorola Droid, I used to get signal strengths down to about -50 something and 60's in indicated signal strength. I can hold both of our Fascinates right next to the network extender's antenna and they will read no better than -86 dBm. So far I've seen signal strengths from -86 dBm to -106 dBm (terrible).
I believe there is a bug in the software (Baseband) on the Fascinate. Previously, I thought the hardware (antenna/radio) wasn't very good, but now it may be software related.
Has anyone seen a signal strength stronger than -86 dBm on the Fascinate/Epic?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have the newest Airrave just installed today its in the other room behind my flatscreen and I get 65-db GPS locks in milli seconds and calls are crystal clear data is extremely fast
Does anyone have a problem with their Nexus 4 signal strength?
I have Bell Canada, which is supposedly has the best coverage in Canada, I live in the suburbs of a relatively large city and I often see no bars at all. I'm sitting on my couch right now and the signal strength is ranging from -97 dBm to -110 dBm.
Do 2.4 Ghz band devices interfere at all? I have bunch of portable phones and 2 routers, so maybe this is related?
Nexus 4 on T-Mobile
I am in Portland OR in an area of good signal according to T-MO but my nexus rarely shows any signal bars inside my house. This is my 3rd N-4. T-Mo says they have great signal in my area.... so what gives with this signal thing?
My reception has been wonky ever since the 4.2.2 and baseband update.
ccgabe said:
I am in Portland OR in an area of good signal according to T-MO but my nexus rarely shows any signal bars inside my house. This is my 3rd N-4. T-Mo says they have great signal in my area.... so what gives with this signal thing?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I get 1-2 bars in my house usually between 95-105 db, outside I get low 80's and full or near full at all times. Even though my bars inside top out at 2 I have still managed to pull up to 13 Mbps but thats on a sunny day. Didn't see any results above 9 Mbps today. I live on the outskirts of a not so major city so I can't really complain. One minute I'm pulling 10 Mbps and the other I'm only getting like 200 Kbps though, but it's all good enough for what I need it for and I can't complain since its only $30/month. I just transferred from Virgin Mobile after their "upgrade" resulted in me and many other of their customers losing data for the last 3 weeks and to this date its still not fixed! Their "3G" speeds were atrocious, I've pulled higher speeds off of T-Mobiles 2G network.
I hear a lot of us who are on 4.2.2 and baseband .48 have had issues so I'm thinking its either a major software issue with the radio firmware that hasn't been addressed yet in any revision or it could be a major hardware issue as well as I flashed .27, .33, and .48 and noticed no differences. I had to set my phone to WCDMA Only to get it to maintain a good connection, otherwise HSPA/HSPA+ would just cut out after 2 minutes of use and revert to 2G or have no data at all for 5-10 minutes. After switching to WCDMA Only this problem went away completely and I haven't lost a signal since. For whatever reason it picks up more adjacent towers as well on this setting.
I have that kind of problem also though I notice it only when the signal is weak.
It goes from -99dbm to -111dbm with no reason. My other phone (Defy) keeps a good -97 at the same spot without any fluctuation.
I will try to switch to wcdma only.
What do you guys think about the cellular strength. Mine loses lte signal and switches to 3g where my other devices keep the lte signal (with reasonable speed). It's about 5-15 dbm more than the other phones. The 3g signal is good tho.
I also experienced this, wanna know is this normal or my phone is defective.
Haven't noticed a difference myself but I have only had the phone for a couple of weeks now. I also flashed to the UK firmware and live in a major metro area . Oddly enough my house is always a dead spot no matter what phone I use. The Tmobile 4G LTE Cellspot fixes that for me at home though so I can't really comment otherwise.