Tiger Bits: Airport Indicator
There's been a subtle change in the behavior of the menu bar's Airport signal indicator in Tiger. According to Macworld UK's review of Tiger, "If you're using Airport, you may think that the reception has suddenly improved because it shows more bars in the menu icon. Not so. Apple says 'we revised the Airport indicator so it better indicates the performance you should get with your current connection. In this case more bars means faster throughput.' My tests suggest the signal strength remains the same, but there's less noise." I'd like to hear some clarification on this, because it sounds a bit odd. I mean, can you have a really good signal, but poor performance so only a bar or two will show? Or a really poor signal with good throughput so the bars are full until you suddenly move a foot to the left and lose the connection entirely?
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Yuri Schimke said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I would guess its more to do with the function of download speed/reliability to signal strength. i.e. 75% signal strength might be just as fast as 100% signal strength. when things drop to 30% you might get degraded performance.
It's probably not a straight line if you graph the two figures.
Just a guess.
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dan said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
This is a really poor decision on apples part. I could care less what my throughput is, as I can use other programs (and now even dashboard widgets) to check it. I want the airport status to show how strong my signal is, not something counterintuitive like throughput. Oh well, guess its time to keep iStumbler running 24/7.
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Mike said 4:23PM on 6-24-2005
As the signal gets worse, WiFi will ramp down speeds (e.g. from 54 to 11 to 5 to 2 to 1mbps) to try to keep a connection.
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dan said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
This is a really poor decision on apples part. I could care less what my throughput is, as I can use other programs (and now even dashboard widgets) to check it. I want the airport status to show how strong my signal is, not something counterintuitive like throughput. Oh well, guess its time to keep iStumbler running 24/7.
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fishpatrol said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
There's also the issue of noise. I've had top-notch signal strength but almost no throughput when there's lots of interference. Yes a little change like this can be annoying, but what good is a signal if you can't get any data?
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Ccooper said 8:54PM on 8-16-2005
You can have a "strong" signal (microvolt field strength) but a noisy radio frequency enviroment that results in packet loss and slows the actual data rate. It's actually a good change IMO.
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Thomas said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
I was wondering how my signal could be so poor when I'm just 5 feet from the wireless router. Thanks for the info!
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df said 4:17PM on 6-16-2005
"This is a really poor decision on apples part. I could care less what my throughput is, as I can use other programs (and now even dashboard widgets) to check it."
But what good is "signal strength" if your throughput stinks? My impression is that throughput is all most people really care about. After all, if you've got good throughput, you've got a good signal -- the inverse isn't necessarily true.
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Botinhas said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
With my PB Ti 550MHz the signal got a really improvement and now i've got just a few losts of connections. With MacOS 10.3.9, in the exactly same location, it was almost impossible to be on-line for a long period.
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Simon Bevan said 4:18PM on 6-16-2005
I am able to get a signal in areas of my house that I couldn't before installing 10.4 so I wonder if any other tweaking was done.
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