Hey everyone! I'm a bit clueless when it comes to tech, so I hope this isn't a silly question. I've always wondered why my phone shows only 2 bars of service but then sometimes websites won't load at all instead of just being slow or poor quality. This happens with every phone and carrier I've used. Once I hit low service, it's like I have no service at all. Can anyone explain why a phone with a few bars can't load things slowly or at a lower quality instead of just giving up? Especially when I'm trying to load a website on Safari; it seems to try for a few seconds and then just quits completely instead of taking longer to load?
1 Answer
The bars on your phone are actually a mix of signal strength and signal-to-noise ratio. Signal strength measures how strong the signal from the cell tower is, while the ratio shows how well your device can pick that signal out from the noise of other signals around. If your phone can't decode the signal accurately, you might not get any data, leading to those frustrating moments where it just doesn't load anything. It's a weird quirk that sometimes even having a couple of signal bars doesn’t guarantee decent data performance.
Thanks for breaking that down! Makes total sense now.