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> perfectly well-understood metaphors for network availability ("how many bars" ...

ACKHSHUALLY, "how many bars" is well known to be very bad indication of network connectivity. Yes, if you have one bar it's probably worse than five, but for example "my phone show five bars and yours only three" is very wrong way to judge -- there's no relative measure.

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That's true, but at least the mental model roughly holds. Somebody who is barely technologically literate will understand that "more bars" is better, and that's exactly what the abstraction should do. Communicate something simply at the cost of precision.

We could have the segments of the ᛒ turn on or off based on signal strength

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