What service do I have?

[LazerBoi_64]

Greetings:

I just purchased a S25 Ultra and am confused.  At work, my signal strength meter shows 3 bars of 5G service.

My old S9 showed 3 bars of sometimes 4GLTE service and sometimes 3 bars of "service".  At home, in a bottom floor apartment, the S9 showed at most 3 bars of "service" until I rebooted, then it saw my 4GLTE network extender and it was full scale everywhere in the apartment.

This brand new S25 shows 3 bars of "service" at most in the apartment and does not see the extender at all.

What level of "service" is "service"?  AND, why does the S25 NOT see the extender?

Oh, and if I have wifi enabled (at work), the service type indicator goes away, so maybe I need to turn off wifi at home to see what happens.

Thanks in advance!

[arianwen27 · Accepted solution]

The bars are less of a "below this point you have no connection" and more of displaying how strong of a signal you're getting. So you could be in a field with 0 bars and make phone calls or have 3 bars in a city and have no connection at all. I personally don't really look at them.

I'm not 100% on this part but I believe the bars also only tell you the signal strength for the currently connected protocol.

To explain a little better. You could be in an area with 1 bar of 5g. If you manually set your phone to use 4g, it might now show 4 bars of 4g.

The phone does it's best to automatically pick the best signal it can.

Since your extender I'm assuming is only 4g, if the phone is using 5g, it won't even know the extender is really there. It would only swap to 4g and use the extender if it determined 5g to be too slow or weak

Try setting your phone to 4g in settings, connections, mobile networks, network mode. Decent chance in 4g mode it'll use the extender.

Though you paid for 5g, you'll want to use it. You can setup a routine within your phone to automatically set 4g mode when at home, then go back to 5g when away from home.

Just letting it be on auto and pick itself is usually best, even if you see low bars. But with what I described, you can force it to swap

[LazerBoi_64]

LOL didn't even know I could set the service level.  Thanks.  Will give that a shot.  It does make sense though.  I did find the network extender option in the menu, and an extender search revealed nothing.

[LazerBoi_64]

By disabling WiFi I could see the service type I was receiving.  Strange behavior though.  What initially started out as full-scale 4G dropped down to 2-3 bar 5G.  When checking for network extenders, either with "Allow 5G service" enabled or disabled, I still could not see my extender.  At this point, I guess I'll leave it as-is.  I don't like not knowing what is going on, but I have too many other rabbit holes I need to go down.  If I see actual phone service being less than acceptable, I'll go complain to Verizon.  Thanks!