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Comment by remcob | Hacker News Reader

I wish we could show real bandwidth, latency and drop rate instead. Even better, have industry agree on minimum values for one bar to four bars of connectivity. And gradually upgrade these requirements over time.

All these names just confuse consumers and distract from solving the actual problems. The radio technology stack is mostly an implementation detail.

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This was added to cyanogen as a status bar option. Someone send the patch to android, became a setting one of the irrelevant post-2.3 versions i believe (when most of the code was scratched because they were forking 3 vs 4 to tweak for tablets), and disappeared on actual versions that were pushed to phones as google do with every little feature where the community do manage to overcome the immense hurdle of contributing to android in the first place.

open source in android only means "carriers do not have to sign a NDA to see the source in order to send patches for OEM marketing tweaks on the UI" :(

How would you know real bandwidth and latency without running a test?

How would you run a test often enough to keep the signal information up-to-date, without impacting data usage and/or battery?

It's a great idea, but I think there's a reason we don't do it. RSSI values work well enough.

Monitor existing radio traffic? Would work at least for bandwidth and drop rate, maybe not latency. If the user isn't using the radios, fall back on a signal-strength based estimate. For bonus points, learn the estimated connectivity based on correlations between previously measured radio metrics and signal strength in the same location.

Or just hide the bars and show a binary "go/no-go" symbol to indicate if the phone has a current radio connection. Your phone is always connected to GCM or Apple's equivalent so why not use the health of that connection as an indicator?

I find that when my iPhone has one bar, web pages often load much more slowly than when I have five bars. So I find the distinction moderately useful.

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