Real world impressions of "Good signal"

General
1

I’ve got a couple of units in areas with what appears to be poor signal. However according to some charts or indeed other devices, the signals woudn’t normally be considered low, but they certainly seem to affect Photon/electrons. Interested in others findings…

Electron, my main test unit reports -90-> -97dB with a quality value of either (mainly)13 or 25 with a few outliers either side, there are fairly frequent dropouts and reconnecting sometimes takes quite some time. This seems to often result in either prolonged flashing green or flashing cyan periods, however -97dB in a phone would still be “Good”.

Photon, will function quite normally once connected with signals @ ~ -85dB however at this level establishing a connection in the first place is not the superfast flawless experience it is at something like -50dB. OTA basically doesn’t work at signals this low (no blocking code, before someone pipes up). This area is quite heavily congested with 2.4Ghz networks, however at this point this is true for just about everyone.

2

My experience is that units reporting around -97dB do in fact drop out regularly, and I’ve seen units that consistently report there, but also have regular dips to the minimum RSSI or so between -107 to -113 dB. Cellular network reception definitely seems to be fairly variable, especially at night in my experience. I think a phone probably manages the reconnect more aggressively than an electron would. -97dB would generally probably categorize as “passable” signal strength, but I wouldn’t say it’s “Good” per se. Again, the minimum registered value is -113dB, which isn’t far down from there. I’ve experienced -93dB or better as being fairly stable, but lower than that starts to seem to have some issues, though I’ve also been successful with OTA updates even at -110dB and poor qual. It sometimes fails of course, but I generally can get it just fine.