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“The signal bars on your iPhone will be replaced by a number,” Martin reports. “The higher the numeric portion of the negative number gets the worse your signal is. For example, -100 is worse than -79.”
Martin reports, “If you tap on the displayed number the display toggles between displaying the number and the normal signal bars.”
Read more in the full article here.
Can ya hear me now?
Snazzy! -93 here :0
-104
Gotta love AT&T
Can someone tell me what a good signal number is? Mine says 80 and I have 5 bars. Is 80 good? I know it’s better than 81, but I’d like to know if there is a scale or something to relate the number to.
Is -79 good? What’s a target number?
I show 3-5 bars, but it returns an error, “error performing request No Network Sevice”‘ but in the middle of this, I got a phone call from the wife.
Somethings not right.
@MacRick et al,
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3821/iphone-4-redux-analyzing-apples-ios-41-signal-fix
does this work on any network worldwide? or only on AT&T?
are there any charges incurred?
At -93 I had two bars. The lower the -# the better your call should sound. Example would be -58 is better than -93.
@rwahrens
“somethings not right”
No kidding. You let you wife call you cell?
-78 here in central Mexico on Telcel.
-80 in the living room.
-103 in my office.
🙁
I’m at -91 with three bars. Is that good or bad?
Well, apparently, -95dBm should give you consistently reliable service. This being digital, the variation in signal strength should make absolutely no difference in quality of audio, or data throughput, as long as the signal is consistently at or above -95dBm. In other words, if you have bad audio, or slow data, and your signal is consistently above -95dBm, your bottleneck is elsewhere.
And now it just jumped to -83 with four bars in exactly the same position!
Let me clarify this a bit; signal strength below -95dBm doesn’t imply poor service; it only means that there is an increasingly greater chance of dropping packets, which translates to garbled (or dropped out) voice and slower and inconsistent data transfer.
-92 with three bars. I’m 2 blocks away from the Nationals stadium.
Range: -80 to -106
What a completely useless piece of junk
i believe that -57 (or is it -53 ?) is the BEST that the phone can possibly get. one bar drops off the screen at -119, so that is the WORST it will go.
not real sure how this is useful for consumers though.
it would be interesting if there was a way to just change out the bars for the numeric system permanently, instead of it only working while in the field test mode.
As I understand it, cell towers have to ration power (signal strength) as the number of users increases. If that is indeed the case, then it would not surprise me if signal strength varied quite a bit over time, even at the same geographic location.
@notahippie
It gives you the actual number for the signal strength. That will hopefully quiet any remaining doubters regarding iPhone antenna performance who continue to insist that Apple merely masked a design flaw by playing games with the bars.
Antennagate seems so last season…..lets talk about the “Blue Screen of Death” and the BP oil spill….why didn’t we hear about that…
@rwahrens
Sounds like you didn’t to put the asterisks at each end. I made the same mistake.
How do you get it off yor phone