Cell Phone Reception Bars Are Meaningless

January 14, 2008 – 2:40 pm

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If you’ve ever had a “full strength” signal but couldn’t complete a call, you may have wondered just how great the cell phone reception bars really were. You are not alone. What do the bars mean after all?

The biggest reason why the signal strength isn’t very helpful for GSM is what’s known as “multipath”. The signal reaching you from the cell can arrive by different routes which are slightly different lengths, meaning that they’re offset in time. If you’ve ever seen “ghosts” on a TV when using rabbit-ear antennas, you’re seeing the same effect. The “ghost” is a multipath component.

Strong multipath components can render the primary signal useless. The “signal strength” tells you how strong the primary signal is, but doesn’t tell you anything about how much multipath interference you’re getting.

The biggest reason the bars are there is to make the customer feel better.

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