5 Bars of Strength – Why don't I have a great Internet connection?

Or … Why does 5 bars sometimes mean good Internet and sometimes not?

Or … Why sometimes do 2 bars give me better connectivity than 5 bars?

First a general comment about '5 bars' or '3 bars' of strength on a cell phone.

On your phone, you will likely have an icon all the time that shows either 3 or 5 (typically 5) bars of strength when you have a strong signal strength. For the rest of this discussion, we'll assume you have a phone that shows 5 bars as the strongest signal strength.

If you take an older phone, and find a location where it says there are 4 bars of strength, then look at what a newer phone says, the newer phone will inevitably say you have 5 bars of strength. There are a couple possible reasons for this:

1. The phone manufacturer wants their newer phones to 'appear' better, so what easier way than to change the definition of what is 5 bars?
2. In some cases, the phones really are better working with a lower strength.

But 5 bars of strength does not mean conceptually 5 bars of quality. You can have a strong signal that is bouncing off metal causing a slightly garbled signal, but it is still a strong signal. With voice, a little bit of garble doesn't really matter. For those of us around a few decades ago, we worked with land line phones that had far more noise than current cell phones and we still managed to speak with friends and colleagues around the world. If you think your current solutions are bad – you should try using the land lines we used in the 1980's and make a call overseas.

But while as a human you can figure out what someone is saying in part from context, with computer data, each packet either arrives perfect or it has to be resent. If even one bit (one 0 or 1) is wrong, the software will see that (check bits) and throw the whole packet away and usually request the packet again. And of course, if the server receives that request with even 1 bit wrong, it won't accept it either.

Experiment you can try:

1. Stand very close to a corrugated metal building in line with a cell tower where you have 5 bars of strength, then try using the phone to browse the internet, depending on several circumstances, you may have 5 bars of strength but very slow internet connectivity due to the metal building distorting the signal and, while it may make voice a little 'noisy', it can make data transfer nearly impossible.
2. Now stand with a concrete wall with no rebar (no metal) in it between you and the cell tower, I have done this and had only 1 or 2 bars of signal strength and yet my Internet connection was very fast. Why? Because while the strength was low, the quality of the signal was high – no interference. The concrete blocked the strength, but didn't cause errors in the data list.

If you are able to reproduce this like I did, you will see that sometimes 5 bars of strength is a poorer connection than 1 bars of strength. Now of course, if you stand beside a corrugated metal building behind the same concrete wall, you will have 1 bar of strength and virtual zero Internet connectivity.

This example is not the only situation: hills, concrete walls with rebar, large tanks of water (aquariums, boilers), large metal objects (boilers, metal walls) can all cause similar situations.

So 5 bars of strength for voice does not tell you how good the data connection quality is. All it really tells you is that it is more likely (but not always) better than 4 bars or 2 bars.

MCe was designed with this in mind: to work as best as possible with a limited or 'lite' internet connections. One of the reason we sync data is so that you can get your data and send your changes when you are in a location that you know has a good data connection and then run with your data later when, while you might have 5 bars of strength, you don't have the quality necessary to download your next page request.

We try to have the absolute fewest number of places in our product where you can run when you have a light/low quality or no internet connection.

So, while it would be nice if looking at the number of bars of strength would tell you how good your data connection is, 1 bar is not an error condition necessarily (though it probably will be) and 5 bars is not a guarantee that you will have a good data connection (though it frequently will be.)

I had great connectivity the 'last time' I stood 'here'…

You may find a location that gives you great reception or data transfer, but sometimes in that same location, you get terrible reception or data transfer. One possible reason for this is your phone is connecting to 2 or 3 different cell towers and your quality depends on which one it currently connected to. The author of this manual lives in a rural location and found that when he drove from one direction to his house his connection was great, but when he drove from another direction to his house the connection was terrible, it was using 2 different towers and once it picked one, it didn't drop it in favor of the better one until it had no choice. He found that by turning the phone off and back on again, the phone would change to the better tower. Additionally, there is one location where, if he stands 2" forward or back he gets two different towers that are in opposite directions, and one of them almost always gives a better connection than the other.

How often does MCe try to reconnect if I lose a connection?

The maximum delay for a retry is 120 seconds. Initially we attempt to reconnect immediately, then we start waiting longer and longer until it only checks every 120 seconds. This is to save power. This means if you get back into a WiFi or Cellphone connection (and you don't have airplane mode turned on) it should retry to re-establish a connection in no less than 60 seconds.

Note: On some, generally lower powered or lower memory, computers, when you go to another application or tab, the browser may be turned off so that our code does not run. In these cases it depends on the browser/device what happens when you come back. So, in total there are at least four possibilities, and they depend entirely on your device/browser, we have no control over this so we just test for so we can handle all of them.

1. It may have reconnected and done anything else that was pending typically this only happens on the more powerful multitasking devices such as a full Windows tablet, this won't occur on a single tasking phone or tablet.
2. It may simply continue where it left off. This means when we say the maximum delay is 120 seconds, that this is 120 seconds with the application running, so if the browser paused it after 5 seconds, it will wait another 115 seconds when you come back to the application.
3. It may refresh all your pages (so you go in fresh) or
4. It may detect that the delay time has expired and try again without refreshing all your pages.

F5, Refresh, took me to a different location

In general, if you are directly on 'a page' you will be returned exactly where you left off.

But if you are in what we call a 'popup', something like settings or the barcode reader, or calculator or picture taker etc.., when you ¹ refresh your browser it will return to the page that you had called the popup from.

A more rare case is when you refresh, and as part of that refresh, you get a newer version of the software that was loaded on your server. If the previous page no longer exists by the same name, then normally you will be redirected back to a default page such as the WO List.

Why sometimes does my cell phone run out of power in hours when I'm not using it, and other times it lasts 2 days?

Also … Why I am charged roaming fees even when I don't use my phone.

Think about it this way. When your cell phone is trying to find a tower nearby, it sends out a 'anyone there' signal ever little bit. When it gets a response (or multiple) it 'reports' its location so that, when a call comes in, the system knows where to find you.

If it doesn't get a response back, it tries a little louder (more power used) and keeps trying higher levels of power until it is using the maximum level.

If it gets no response, it waits a bit, and then tries again.

Taking the author's Galaxy S8 for example, if there is a tower close by, the power consumption allows the phone to last more than two days. But if the author is in the mountains where there are no towers, it will run out of power in mere hours.

Tip: Turn your phone to flight mode when you know you are in an area where there is no signal.

That way the phone stops trying to report its location and stops wasting battery trying to find someone (a cell tower) that will listen to its plaintive cries for attention.