MacOS – OS X status bar wifi icon – meaning of bars

macbook promacoswifi

On my MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini, the status bar includes the standard "radiating sector" wifi icon which you can click on to select a wifi network, or Option-click on to see additional info such as BSSID, Channel, RSSI, transmit rate. The icon itself show 1, 2, 3 or 4 lines in black to indicate how good the wifi connection is. My question is this – what do the different numbers of lines indicate? Is it various thresholds in signal-to-noise ratio? Transmit speed? RSSI? Bit-error rate?

The built-in WIFI Diagnostics app (I'm running Mountain Lion 10.8.4) tells me that RSSI is -65 to -70 dBm, noise is between -85 and -90 dBm, SNR is between 10 and 25, Quality is either Good or Excellent, and Tx Rate is between 1.0 and 11 Mbps.

The reason for asking is that I'm at the end of a pretty poor wifi connection right now, but the wifi icon is constantly showing all 4 lines in solid black! Why?

Best Answer

RSSI or Received signal strength indication is what is used for the display of the bars.

The higher the number ( closer to 0 ) the better your signal strength.

For Apple devices they used a scale of -100 to 0. But you'll never see 0, or even close. Most people will see a number between about -50 and -80, with around -50 being excellent.

-50 will show all the bars and -90 will show gray bars. Not sure if it will go to -100 since you don't have a signal then ;)

So if you're asking for a scale I think its around 10 to 12.5 RSSI per bar.

While you have a good signal strength, your throughput speed ( Tx Rate ) isn't that fast.

One method to calculate signal quality is to compute the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR). SNR is the signal level (in dBm) minus the noise level (in dBm). Both of these values are typically represented as negative numbers. For example, a signal level of -53dBm and a noise value of -90dBm would yield an SNR of 37dB (i.e., SNR = Signal - Noise = -53 -(-90) = 37)

The calculated SNR value, as measured from a wireless client, would decrease as the range to the base station increases due to applicable free space loss. Also an increase in RF intereference from microwave ovens, cordless phones, walls, ceilings, etc, which would increase the noise level, would also decrease the overall SNR value.

SNR Guideline

40+dB = Excellent signal

25dB to 40dB = Very good signal

15dB to 25dB = Low signal

10dB to 15dB = Very low signal

5dB to 10dB = Little or no signal

In your case -65 - -90 = 25 or -70 - -85 = 15

So you have a 15db to 25db signal OR as diagnostics calls it SNR which isn't that good but isn't really bad either.

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