Further, faster.

Connectivity challenged nomads are constantly wishing for just a bit more range, or just a bit more speed from their mobile arsenal.

But seeking to understand all the things that can impact your cellular signal can quickly becoming overwhelming - and optimizing effectively is often anything but simple.

It is little wonder that people end up focused on the simplest indicator they can find - the signal strength bars.

One bar bad, five bars good - right?

But bars are only the tip of the iceberg - and when it comes to actual performance it is not at all unusual for a one bar signal to outperform five.

And sometimes the simplest tweaks can make a huge difference in your real-world performance, even though the bars may not change a bit.

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Boosters or Antennas?

But before we get into the nitty-gritty of understanding your signal performance, we're often asked one basic question - are boosters or antennas better for enhancing your signal and thus your performance?

In our testing, there's a place for both - but it really comes down to the gear you're using for your cellular data access.

We have separate guides going over the advantages of each, but here are the basics:

Regardless of which you're using (or none at all), there's still a lot to understand about how to understand the signal you're getting and how to best optimize it. Here's what the rest of this guide covers:

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Included in This Guide:

• One Hour In-Depth Video (member only)
• Measuring Your Signal Enhancing Efforts - It's All About Performance
• Understanding Raw Signal Strength
  • Signal Bars & Dots
  • Raw Signal Strength (dBm)
  • Measuring Raw Signal Strength
• Other Signal Traits (SNR, Quality, Type, Band) (member only)
• LTE Frequency Bands Explained (member only)
  • LTE Bands & Cellular Range
• Hidden Multipliers: MIMO & Carrier Aggregation (member only)
  • MIMO: Multiple-In, Multiple-Out
  • LTE-A Carrier Aggregation
• Things That Impact Wireless Signals (member only)
• Strategies For Signal & Performance Enhancing (member only)
  • Boosting: Only When Necessary
  • External Antennas: Use the Primary Port
  • Dealing With Network Congestion
  • Finding Cell Towers & Aiming Directional Antennas
  • Other Tips for Performance Enhancing
• Troubleshooting - Where to Look When Things are Slow  (member only)

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Measuring Your Signal Enhancing Efforts - It's All About Performance

Bars are relatively meaningless in the effort to determine your actual cellular data performance. They're basically a nice visual indicator, but each device manufacturer uses their own formulas for coming up with what determines 1 bar versus 4 bars  (or dots).

And usually bars have nothing to do with how fast your connection will be, there's a lot going on behind the scenes with different frequency bands, tower congestion, carrier aggregation and more.

Data speeds & consistency is what really matters when considering a mobile internet connection.

To truly optimize your connectivity, you need to learn how to measure your real-world performance to know if your efforts are having an impact.

And the best quantitative measurement of this is the download and upload speeds you are getting.

To learn more about testing your upload and download speeds, head on over to our guide:

Testing Your Mobile Internet Speeds Guide

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Understanding Raw Signal Strength

Speed is everything. But sometimes it helps to pay attention to the raw signal strength too, particularly when you are trying to optimize your connection.

But first, you need to understand what you are looking at.

Signal Bars & Dots

Everyone knows that more bars (or dots on Apple devices) is a good thing – but very few people realize that different phones and operating systems calculate how many signal bars to display very differently.

This means that comparing bars, unless you are on the same phone and same carrier, is actually a very poor way to compare signal quality between different devices.

The bars your phone is displaying sometimes do not even directly correspond to the actual underlying signal strength. In addition to raw signal strength, the phone may be measuring network congestion and other variables to calculate how many bars to display.

In general, iPhones put more weight on network congestion when calculating what to display, and Android focuses more on raw signal strength. But always keep in mind - every device is different!

To go deeper than bars and to get a sense of the real signal strength being received over the air (and thus the impact a booster or antenna is having) - it is a good idea to learn how to look up the raw received signal strength on your mobile devices.

Raw Signal Strength (dBm)

Raw cellular signal strength is usually reported in dBm, which is a measure of received energy relative to a milliwatt of power, recorded in decibels.

The decibel is a logarithmic scale - every change by 10 represents a 10x change in received signal power. Received cellular signals are a fraction of a milliwatt, so the measured dBm result will be recorded as a negative number and the numerically lower the number, the weaker the actual signal.

• -50dBm would be considered an awesome signal. You are probably standing under the tower.
• -60dBm is 10x weaker but still great.
• -70dBm is 100x weaker.
• -80dBm is 1,000x weaker.
• -90dBm is 10,000 weaker.
• -100dBm is 100,000x weaker - and is when you are likely to start seeing a performance impact.
• -110dBm is a million times weaker than -50dBm but is still often usable.
• -120dBm is an extremely weak signal. By the time you would see -120dBm the device has probably already given up and switched to "No Service".

Modern LTE devices can often still deliver amazing results even with an incredibly weak signal - so don't get too obsessed with measuring dBm. Focus on testing speed!

Measuring Raw Signal Strength

Most cellular devices have a way to look up the raw signal strength - but you may have to dig into the diagnostic menus.

Here are a few specific tips:

• Mobile Hotspots: Look for an "About" or "Diagnostics" screen when connected to the control panel via your web browser. Some hotspots with an on-device LCD screen also have this info tucked into the on-screen menus.
• Android: On most modern Android devices, you can find the raw signal strength if you go to Settings -> About Phone -> Status -> SIM Status. There are a lot of "Signal Check" apps in the Play store that give you an easier way to check this, and you can even add a widget to your Today screen or status bar.
• iPhone: For privacy and security reasons Apple blocks apps from accessing the raw cellular signal details. While iPhones have a hidden field test mode by dialing *3001#12345#*  - Apple has removed most of the useful information (like dBs) from these screens since iOS 9. We have not yet found a solution to looking this information up.
  • TIP: You can also click on the "Serving Cell Info" to find the "Freq Band Indicator" to look up what LTE band you are connected to. If the number doesn't make sense, quit and restart Field Test Mode and check again.
• iPad: Unfortunately - there is no Field Test Mode for iPad, and thus no way at all to check the raw signal strength.

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