I always look forward to travelling to the village every festive season; the serene atmosphere and the epic scenery is always a relief from the boisterous city life. The slow rate of development gave the inhabitants little concern compared to the very unstable telecommunication network bedevilling the community.
It is a thug of war to get a fairly stable network that can at least allow one to make a simple phone call. To make a call, one has to climb a tree or any high platform to get cellular reception. I always noticed that at ground level, the network bars fluctuated between one and empty bars, but on a high platform the cellular network bars becomes fairly stable allowing one to perform cellular activities. This is the experience of most rural communities in Africa with little or no network coverage.
The network bars to many is the indication of network availability on their mobile. The more the network bars the better the network they presume, and it has proven to be so back there in those rural villages. However, there are instance were the network bars will be full but people are still unable to make cellular communications. This is to state that, there is something more to the indications on the network bar.
Do More Network Bars Mean Better Network Quality?
Network bars are supposed to represent the cell phones ability to connect to the cellular network based on how powerful the carrier’s radio signal is being received. But experts say that the bars that one sees displayed on any cell phone can be misleading.
Cell phone manufacturers use a variety of different radios in their smartphones and every radio is a little bit different. It’s up to the manufacturer to decide how the cell phone reports back to the base station, and how many bars it will display for a specific signal strength. There are instances where you can have interference or capacity problems and you may have plenty of network bars on your cell phone and still have an unreliable reception.
Network bar is measured in dBm, which is decibel-milliwatts. The range of decibels will indicate if the network is strong or weak. A -113 decibels is on the low end of the signal bar range, while -50 decibels is on the high end. The closer the decibel measurement is to zero, the stronger the signal.
The measure of a good signal differs slightly depending on the underlying technology. On iPhones for instance, the fifth network bar on the iPhone represents about 40dB, but the fourth bar only represents about 10dB. The third bar represents a change of only about 2dB. The second bar represents 4dB, and the first bar represents a difference of 6dB.
In conclusion, the network bars showing on your mobile do not necessarily determine the strength of cell phone network service per time even though it was designed to do so. Many factors like The type of device one is using, interference or capacity problems and geographical location could determine network reception. It is important to also keep to mind that You can have full signal bars but if the network is heavily congested you will still have problems maintaining a good connection especially in heavily populated areas like in big cities, or events where many people are using the network at the same time.