Tom in Bristol
Well-known member
I know they all display LTE when they are in LTE coverage areas. I never said they didn't. LTE phones do not actually display the signal strength of the LTE radio, though. The signal strength they display is the voice signal strength. That's why the Revolution (I believe) has a separate menu indicating the two different signal strengths, that of the voice radio and that of the LTE radio, both in numerical format.
Again, the number of signal strength bars displayed is never representative of LTE signal strength. This is the case on all existing Verizon LTE phones.
Your post triggered a recollection that I'd wondered about re indicator bars back when I got a Bionic on launch day. At that time my area didn't have 4G but we got it here a week later. On CDMA I would consistently see 4 bars with a drop to 3 bars when inside a building. After 4G began it was nearly always 2 bars inside and 3 bars when I went outside to smoke.
A thread here on AC-Bionic referred to an Anandtech article that might offer you some more info at:
AnandTech - Motorola Droid Bionic Review - Dual Core with 4G LTE
"The Bionic also is the first device (to the best of my knowledge) that reports 4G LTE signal bars based on channel quality in addition to just received signal strength. Devices like the Droid Charge and others can be somewhat misleading and just report the bar visualization based on signal strength. It took me a while to figure out how to actually get to the Bionic’s 4G LTE signal metrics, as it isn’t the number shown in “About” - that’s actually just what’s reported from MDM6600 for EVDO or 1x."
There is more in the article that if far above my tech savvy, including a listing using aLogcat alongside a screenshot of the Status page...hope it will provide you with info and you'll be able to make sense out it all.
I'm about a mile from our cell tower that is on top of a good sized hill which may explain why my Bionic has never suffered from the data drop-outs-3G/4G fluctuations that seem to plague so many Bionics, but Ill still be quite happy to get the promised OTA 'soon' and 'later this year'! (Sounds kinda like a GN launch promise, huh?)
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