Signal strength indication difference

[pazzo02]

I noticed something odd yesterday. I was in the park w/ my kids (almost right under the AT&T tower) so I wanted to run some tests. With 5 bars my speedtest.net speeds weren't much different than I've had with 2 bars. Even more disturbing was when I opened the Elixer app. It said my network signal was 59% when the device showed 5 bars! If that's right I wonder if it's possible that something is set in the software/firmware to limit the network signal, thus keeping the connection slower. Any ideas?

 

[pazzo02]

Has anyone else looked into this?

 

[ednygma]

I have not noticed this but will keep my eye out as well.

 

[RenoD2010]

Even more disturbing was when I opened the Elixer app. It said my network signal was 59% when the device showed 5 bars!

From what I understand the most reliable measurement of signal strength is dB/dBm. The closer to 0 (zero), the better the signal. The bars can be misleading because bar 5 can have a 40 dBm range while bar 4 may only show a variance of 10 dBm. And even that varies from phone to phone.

On the Inspire go to Setting/About Phone/Network. It will tell you, in real time what your signal strength is.

Here are my current stats/circumstances for comparative purposes:
(I'm not sure where the closest tower is)
NH
N. Hampton (about 2 miles from coast along I-95)
2nd Floor of commercial building
Signal Strength: -105 dBm to -89 dBm (have yet to see anything under -40 in this area)
Speedtest (Ookla) results at that strength:
Ping: 192 ms
Down: 2786 kbps
Up: 347 kbps (AT&T has obviously NOT activated the HSUPA radio yet).

So maybe you should take a dBm reading under the tower and pair that with your Speedtest comparisons.

 

[pazzo02]

So maybe the Elixer app sees 100% signal strength as 0dBm? This device may never be able to reach that. It's odd, though, because on wifi with a full signal Elixer will show that between 90% and 100%. I'll have to dig deeper on this.

 

[RenoD2010]

I'll have to dig deeper on this.

How much of our lives could we spend "digging deeper" into maximizing our tech if we had the time?

It seems all I've done for the past few weeks is dig into things regarding my Inspire.

 

[pazzo02]

The depth of digging is also inversely proportionate to the age of the device.