How are the power bars on my wifi icon measured?

[AC Question]

how are the power bars on my wifi icon measured?

i am doing a science literature review on some stuff

 

[dpham00]

Re: how are the power bars on my wifi icon measured?

They are probably set by dbm.

 

[Rukbat]

Re: how are the power bars on my wifi icon measured?

They're arbitrary, there's no signal level per bar. (And on CDMA, the bars don't indicate signal level, they indicate something that equates to signal quality - but again, there's no standard.) It's not like an S meter, where S9 is 50uv at the receiver terminals, and each S unit is 6db, it's just 5 bars means more signal than 3 bars.