I was watching a video today and noticed that on T-Mobile (USA) using a Samsung Galaxy S4, when you have -109dbm LTE or better, it shows as full signal (4 bars), when it drops to -110dbm it shows 3 bars.
See the video at about 6:15 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9pDB1kGmLY
I have the same phone, and in the UK you get 1 bar of 4G when you are at -104dbm or worse, and 2 bars when you are -103dbm or better. That T-Mobile phone shows 3 bars at -110dbm, but my Galaxy S4 shows 0 bars at -116dbm and promptly falls back to 3G, sometimes I will see it hang on until around -120dbm but it almost always drops before that.
So with T-Mobile, what's going on? Do they want customers to believe they have a better signal than they really do, or does their network actually let the signal get worse than ours without falling back to 3G?
I've found -120dbm on LTE to be plenty usable, maybe UK networks are falling back to 3G much quicker than any US LTE network would.
See the video at about 6:15 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9pDB1kGmLY
I have the same phone, and in the UK you get 1 bar of 4G when you are at -104dbm or worse, and 2 bars when you are -103dbm or better. That T-Mobile phone shows 3 bars at -110dbm, but my Galaxy S4 shows 0 bars at -116dbm and promptly falls back to 3G, sometimes I will see it hang on until around -120dbm but it almost always drops before that.
So with T-Mobile, what's going on? Do they want customers to believe they have a better signal than they really do, or does their network actually let the signal get worse than ours without falling back to 3G?
I've found -120dbm on LTE to be plenty usable, maybe UK networks are falling back to 3G much quicker than any US LTE network would.