Confusion on bars

[CompCrash]

I love what you guys are doing it a big help for those that need to have true coverage data. However using bars is a very misleading concept. My real issue is that with the way phones are bars mean different things and don't show the same signal between phones, and it looks like you are grabbing that data without getting the dBm at the same time. For example -110 dBm on Galaxy Nexus will show up as 1 bar, however on iPhone 4 will show as 2. Also phones with two types of networks like CDMA and LTE will have two dBm levels for each, so showing the bars for those phones doesn't even say what network it is on. Showing the bars would be fine if you could hover over and show the dBm as well, as well as show what network the signal is on. As is now the bars are useless.

What i would like to know is what data is actually being shown and are you going to make it clear what you are comparing.

[aelfwyne]

Pretty sure they're grabbing dbm and displaying it as bars to avoid confusion. Many people don't know how to read dbm.

[stevealbright]

I love what you guys are doing it a big help for those that need to have true coverage data. However using bars is a very misleading concept. My real issue is that with the way phones are bars mean different things and don't show the same signal between phones, and it looks like you are grabbing that data without getting the dBm at the same time. For example -110 dBm on Galaxy Nexus will show up as 1 bar, however on iPhone 4 will show as 2. Also phones with two types of networks like CDMA and LTE will have two dBm levels for each, so showing the bars for those phones doesn't even say what network it is on. Showing the bars would be fine if you could hover over and show the dBm as well, as well as show what network the signal is on. As is now the bars are useless.

What i would like to know is what data is actually being shown and are you going to make it clear what you are comparing.

As [aelfwyne] stated, we are grabbing the dbm and displaying it in bars to avoid confusion. The use of "bars" is a widely adapted translation from what we get from dbms. The issue with dbms is that the numbers (usually negative ranges) vary from carrier to carrier, network to network, etc. We do indeed log the raw (dbm) and calculate it differently per carrier and network type as this is needed. We also have to factor in the SNR (signal to noise) ratio because that plays a big factor in the overal signal.

One thing to keep in mind is that I am not coming up with this logic off the top of my head. I'm pretty sure my brain would explode and if I even tried. We are using public open source code our of the Android OS. Even though we are using the same code and ranges they have, we still run into unique situations like for example the Galaxy S2. This phone reports all critical field values back as -1 and asu (gsm) as 99. 99 for GSM is a special case, which should be automatic 0 bars. Well, Samsung in this device ...came up with something different.

So as we go on this will be perfected. Now back to your question... So if you compare the iphone to your android device, these could be calculated differently. Most certainly if they are on different network types. I like the idea of some way providing more unique views for power users like your self (most users would get confused on negative dbms showing). We do store this value and use it to calculate the bars... but I will mention to the team to see what they think on bring some extra display features like that to the user.

Hope that explains a lot to you and if you have any more questions please feel free to ask.

Thanks!

[CompCrash]

Thanks that actually helps a lot. I understand where you are coming from but the way it looked to me it was hard to tell exactly what you were showing. Thanks for the clarification on how you guys do it.

PS: I just realized my post might have come across wrong, I really just wanted to know how you were doing it. As well as a way to show it better.

[altonherry]

Nice post. I like it. Thanks for sharing these information. Keep it up.

[Brad555]

You are saying right and i agree with you on this issue.