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Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength

nickvsnetworking.com

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Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength

#151

Post by hnbad »

microtonal wrote: post #76
eqvinox wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You know, I don't recall ever seeing 1 bar of signal strength on a smartphone. I do. I'm from Germany, land of perpetual EDGEing. Highest total GDP in the EU but can't build a mobile network for the life of it. Then again we somehow forgot how to run trains and build cars without cheating, so I guess it fits. Want to see a single bar? Come visit, our carriers aren't on the list with that inflate flag enabled. I gue…

I feel you. We have stellar coverage pretty much everywhere in NL. Heck, I was recently in a work video meeting in the car, not a single drop. The route included part of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afsluitdijk Yet, when we visit family in Germany, five minutes after crossing the border we are in a cellular dead zone.

Germany is a developing country when it comes to broadband let alone wireless internet.

The short version is that the chancellor we had in the 1990s didn't like how the public broadcasting channels were talking about his failures and wanted to push the development of private broadcasters (who being beholden to financial interests rather than objective news coverage mostly spoke favorably of him) by prioritizing cable television over fiber. A surprising number of things came downstream from that pivotal decision, e.g. the completely braindead way we sold frequency bands (which resulted in some literally remaining unused because there were initially no requirements to actually do anything with them).

Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength

#152

Post by hombre_fatal »

Yizahi wrote: post #112
userbinator wrote: post #27

A friend recently got a (carrier-supplied) phone and has been complaining about how it would often have no reception despite showing a good signal; taking mine to the same areas on the same carrier and doing a comparison, mine was indeed showing no bars on the signal indicator. The difference is, mine predates this stupidity, and I can also see the details in the MTK Engineer Mode app, which shows the actual signal s…

I highly recommend Network Cell Info Lite app for the network diag. It shows signal strength with all details for each of the SIM modules, shows on a map in real time where are the base station you are currently connected to, and other interesting statistics.

There’s no way you earnestly recommend the hot steaming pile of ad-ridden caca I just installed on my phone.

That might be the worst app I’ve used on my iPhone in a year. Better off vibe coding an app to give you signal strength.

Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength

#153

Post by 1718627440 »

lifestyleguru wrote: post #141
1718627440 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you give a note to the regulation authority and your boss gets fired instead.

You'd need to have this specific request from supervisor on paper, with witnesses, all video recorded with supervisor's consent. Otherwise you'd be sued into poverty for besmirching.

When the supervisor fires you, for such a reason, it seemed to be important enough. You also don't need any proof to report someone to the authorities.

Even if the the company has enough lawyers to win in court, it is still expensive. That's why the lawyers are among the risk aversest. So reporting to a company internal lawyer might already be enough.

Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength

#154

Post by binarysneaker »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #152
Yizahi wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I highly recommend Network Cell Info Lite app for the network diag. It shows signal strength with all details for each of the SIM modules, shows on a map in real time where are the base station you are currently connected to, and other interesting statistics.

There’s no way you earnestly recommend the hot steaming pile of ad-ridden caca I just installed on my phone. That might be the worst app I’ve used on my iPhone in a year. Better off vibe coding an app to give you signal strength.

Just tried the Android version and it was ok.

Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength

#155

Post by crtasm »

gadders wrote: post #113

Related: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lohttps://www.... "Tests carried out by research group PolicyTracker, and shared with BBC's Morning Live, found that nearly 40% of the time a phone displays the 5G symbol, it is actually using a 4G connection"

fixing link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lo

Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength

#156

Post by ac29 »

MaxL93 wrote: post #130
userbinator wrote: post #27

A friend recently got a (carrier-supplied) phone and has been complaining about how it would often have no reception despite showing a good signal; taking mine to the same areas on the same carrier and doing a comparison, mine was indeed showing no bars on the signal indicator. The difference is, mine predates this stupidity, and I can also see the details in the MTK Engineer Mode app, which shows the actual signal s…

-140 dBm is far beyond no coverage, yeah. -120 dBm is pretty much when LTE stops working (sometimes it can painfully stretch to -123 to -125 but usually not because of noise etc)

Yes, even thermal background noise (the noise level that exists even in complete absence of RF) would be expected to be above -140dBm. It scales with channel size and temperature.

As near as I can tell, the smallest subcarrier 5G can use is 15kHz, the thermal noise floor for a 15kHz channel at room temp (300K) would be -132 dBm.

My guess is whatever chip doing the measurement simply couldn't measure that low accurately, or it reports "nothing detected" as -140 dBm.

Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength

#157

Post by mr_toad »

eru wrote: post #124
wongarsu wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GDP per square metre is probably the best metric, even though it's the more rarely used one. [1] has a neat map of Europe by GDP density. However Germany is still very high in both GDP per capita and GDP per land area. Roughly on par with the UK, and far higher than France which has a much better mobile network 1: https://ssz.fr/gdp/

> GDP per square metre is probably the best metric, even though it's the more rarely used one. [1] has a neat map of Europe by GDP density. Well, it would be the best metric, if your country was homogeneously populated. If everyone lives in one big city and there's literally no one in the rest of the country, then I expect mobile reception (and every other service) to be pretty good for everyone, because they all sta…

> If everyone lives in one big city and there's literally no one in the rest of the country, then I expect mobile reception (and every other service) to be pretty good for everyone, because they all stay in the big city.

Sometimes the reception is good but the data rate is poor because of too few towers per person, or because the cellphone companies connections to the wider internet are saturated.

Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength

#158

Post by gadders »

crtasm wrote: post #155
gadders wrote: post #113

Related: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lohttps://www.... "Tests carried out by research group PolicyTracker, and shared with BBC's Morning Live, found that nearly 40% of the time a phone displays the 5G symbol, it is actually using a 4G connection"

fixing link: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crexqyj7n5lo

Thanks. That'll teach me not to proofread.

Re: Simple trick to increase coverage: Lying to users about signal strength

#159

Post by lxgr »

dataflow wrote: post #80
lukec11 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is usually for a good reason - dual sim phones are almost always “DSDS”, or “Dual SIM Dual Standby”. The secondary SIM, because it doesn’t need to make a data connection, parks itself on the lowest-frequency (and therefore usually lowest-bandwidth) connection it can find. Meanwhile, your data-connected SIM is busy trying to stream a video or upload your photos, so it’s using a higher-frequency + higher bandwidth…

> Meanwhile, your data-connected SIM is busy trying to stream a video or upload your photos You're making huge and incorrect assumptions here, no? This also happens when your phone is entirely idle... and it randomly changes if you sit still for some time...

How do you know that your phone is entirely idle?
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