You know, I don't recall ever seeing 1 bar of signal strength on a smartphone. And once it's down to 2 bars, it barely works, if at all.

Human brains: wow, what a bunch of suckers. Damn.

By the way, is it legal to be deceptive in this way?

> You know, I don't recall ever seeing 1 bar of signal strength on a smartphone.

I do.

I'm from Germany, land of perpetual EDGEing. Highest total GDP in the EU but can't build a mobile network for the life of it.

Then again we somehow forgot how to run trains and build cars without cheating, so I guess it fits.

Want to see a single bar? Come visit, our carriers aren't on the list with that inflate flag enabled. I guess they didn't get the same memo as the car manufacturers ;D

Humans are strange indeed.

I work with cellular BDA-DAS[1] gear sometimes, and I don't recall the last time I looked at the signal strength display on my phone. It has probably been years.

For me: It either works, or it doesn't work. It is either fast-enough, or impossibly-slow. It's very binary, and the bar graph at the top never told me a damned thing about what I should expect.

[1]: Bi-Directional Amplifier, Distributed Antenna System. In theory, such constructs can make indoor cellular coverage quite good inside of buildings that previously had none. In reality it can be... complicated. And while the bar graph doesn't mean anything, I still need ways to see what's happening as I spend hours, days, or [sometimes!] weeks surveying and troubleshoot and stuff. The phone can report things like RSRP, RSRQ, and some other tasty bits instead of just a useless graph -- and from there, I can sometimes make a hand-waving guess as to what I may reasonably expect for performance.

But that stuff is normally pretty well hidden from view.

I had a very dangerous 1-bar the other day. You see I was in the Canadian wilderness relying on iPhone text-over-satellite, which works well, but only when you have no signal. I needed to relay a message to the rest of my group when suddenly I find myself with one bar of 3G that was completely and totally inoperable. No messages were getting through. But to make matters worse, since my phone thought it had a bar, it wouldn't activate satellite. I tried every setting and then for 20 minutes hiding behind various rocks to try to get my one bar to go away when finally I found a spot that would let me satellite text again.

Try going into a Home Depot. I don't think I've ever found one where aside from fairly near the front I've had other than 0 or 1 bars, across a variety of phones and carriers and in neighborhoods where the signal outside the store was strong.

The net is telling me this is because of the aisle after aisle of tall metal shelving and the building itself also has a lot of metal in the construction.

It is quite annoying when you are trying to use the Home Depot app to look up something.

I’ve always just blamed the extreme bloat of the web and lack of design around poor connections for 2bar lack of performance. HN usual works fine on but that’s about it for sites I visit.

Consider yourself blessed, the one place in my neighborhood where I get one bar on LTE is the same place I once was repairing my car. Awful experience but the rest of the subdivision is fine.

For some reason, I've spent several weeks (across a few years) in Italy with exactly one bar of signal strength on an iPhone when roaming on Vodafone.

It must actually be tricky to space out towers that sparsely without creating any obvious coverage gaps, but if anyone is up to the task, it's certainly Vodafone (let's not talk about the actual service quality, though).

Android phones show 1 bar pretty reasonably and fair. To illustrate this, I have 1 bar on both my SIM modules right now, which translates to the -125 dBm signal on both. So the connection is up, but it is borderline low.

Wifi-calling to the rescue :)

Our house is in kind of a hollow despite being in a city, and I (and guests - all networks seem just as bad) get one bar basically all the time at home.

Phone calls are hit-and miss without WiFi calling switched on.

Rural - I see one bar quite often, and sometimes a call will barely hold on through zero bars (works best if I’m just listening).

But one bar is death for Internet - though HN will often load; anything heavier won’t.

I have one right now and internet is working well enough. Even says lte.

I see it all the time driving through the country. Probably a dozen times just today driving through the american east coast. I agree that two bars is the bare minimum for any functionality though.

Heh, my phone consistently reports 1 bar inside my apartment within a major metropolitan area. Indeed binary, because it works enough for the few times I actually take calls not on wifi.

Wish I could post a pic on HN because I’m reading this with one bar. But it’s on iOS. Does Apple just not let carriers do this?

spend some time in rural areas, you will see a one or two bar here and there and sometimes it works, sometimes it is not.