Is there any meaning to the pattern that cell phone signal bars show? That is, the meaning of the number of bars visible is simple - the more the bars, the stronger the signal. But they don’t always appear in the same pattern. It is not as though there is simply a first bar, a second bar, and so on. Sometimes they form vertical clusters, sometimes horizontal, sometimes other patterns. What does it mean?
1 You phone is from the future
2 Acid trip
3 Apocalypse
Chose 2
Really never heard of that.
Is the OP misreading the status bar on his phone, maybe? WiFi signal strength vs phone reception maybe?
What phone?
Phone strength (vertical bars) vs WiFi (kinda horizontal fan shape?
To that end a depiction of what you are talking about: http://www.neowin.net/images/uploaded/signal-bar-change.jpg
The left hand side is phone signal strength and Wifi is on the right hand (lower) side.
Got an error trying to access the image. On my phone signal strenth and WiFi/3G are right next to each other, so phones might vary.
I know it varies, just trying to provide and example of the WiFi signal next to a signal bar. We’ll try that image again: Trying again.
And there are icons representing battery life as well that may be confusing depending on the phone.
OK, I am looking at an LG Dare phone, though I think I saw the same thing on my LG NV phone. From left to right across the top of the display are a few special symbols including the letters “EV” over the letters “1X”, then two rows (one above the other) of solid white rectangles that I think are the cellular signal strength indicator bars, then some other symbols, then concentric arcs that build rightward (I think these are WIFI but am not sure), then a Bluetooth icon, and finally an outline of a single battery cell with up to 4 solid rectangles filling it.
If I have what I think of as “4 bars of cellular signal”, it might display in any of the following ways (with 1 representing a white rectangle and 0 representing nothing):
11110
00000
00000
11110
11000
11000
11100
10000
et cetera. Though, it never appears in two discontiguous clumps like this:
10001
10001
I would have expected that if this is showing a single degree of freedom, the pattern would be more predictable, like for instance:
10000
00000
11000
10000
11100
00000
11110
00000
11111
00000
11111
10000
and so forth.
So, I am curious why that isn’t how it acts.
If this is an acid trip, my esteem for the '60s is plummeting.
From what I can gather, it appears the top bar is showing you EVDO strength, and the bottom bar 1X strength.
More info here and here.
Correct. Picture here. They are two separate signal strength meters, one above the other.
Oh! Well, that explains it, thanks!
I’ve never heard anybody say they have so many bars of one or the other. Reading the Wikipedia articles about each does not shed much light on which one matters in a given situation. What’s the phone maker’s intent in showing both? Which one should I care about?
Anyway, THANK YOU for clearing up that mystery!
EVDO is prefered, but 1x is okay if all you want to do is send/receive calls or texts.
EVDO is Data Only. The DO part in EVDO. It will not be useful for phone calls. EVDO stands for evolution data only.
Hmmm…
according to Stephen Fry on QI the number of bars doesn’t mean a thing.
One bar/ five bars you’ve got reception.
Is 1X at 850 MHz and EVDO at 1700 MHz, on a Verizon phone?
For some reason I thought voice was digitized, and figured everything into and out of the phone would just be packet data. It wouldn’t matter which band was used, so the phone would use whatever was cheapest at that moment. Sounds like this isn’t the case, though - why?
The voice is digitized. The voice data is sent in packets but not tcp/ip packets. It goes over 1X not EVDO. It is done this way because voice data has relatively strict latency requirements and data generally does not. There is also a lot of history involved. EVDO is an extension to 1X allowing the carrier to add higher capacity data to existing network that only needed people who want data to upgrade their phones.
If things were being designed from scratch now with no need to keep older phones working then voice and data would go over the same frequencies with the network giving the voice packets scheduling that takes into account the time sensitivity for voice.
The new standard LTE which has been starting to be deployed in various cities around the world still does not have good standards for how to do voice. All the carriers and phones still run voice using the older standards. The industry may ultimately punt and just do voice over IP with no special service given to voice packets because voice is such a small portion of the packets that the savings are not that big but there is a fair amount of thinking taking place about how to do voice over LTE in an efficient way that takes into account the specific nature of voice traffic.
I can’t speak authoritatively for Verizon/LTE, but at least some cell phone providers are most certainly moving to putting everything over IP. It’s done with a combination of QoS policies for voice traffic and pseudowire emulation that lets the older 2G protocols run over IP networks without them realizing they’re not running on T1s anymore.
As data speeds have gotten faster and faster, the old practice of bundling T1s became completely impractical and metroethernet became more available–there’s no reason to maintain the cost and maintenance of both T1s for voice and ethernet for data unless you have to for some reason.
As for why it wasn’t done earlier? Even now, the technology and knowledge levels can be iffy. Fault detection/routing convergence times that are considered extremely fast for data traffic are disastrously slow for voice, and on the voice side, the old technology was mature and well-understood and it can be difficult for people with 25 years of experience in a technology that can reliably give 99.999% uptime to jump to something completely new that always seems to literally be on the bleeding edge.
Interesting.
We have voice over IP at our house, and I wondered about the fact that it doesn’t sound as if there are latency issues breaking things up and creating static or something. I guess latency is practically manageable in this case (perhaps because everything is hardwired but I don’t know).
I look forward to a day when ALL data are moved around in packets, perhaps IP packets. I wonder when (and if) this will happen…