I, like the vast majority of people, judge my Wi-Fi signal by how many bars are on my screen. Whether it’s my smartphone, tablet, laptop, or otherwise, those trusty bars are always there to tell you just how good the Wi-Fi you’re using is.

Except that’s not actually telling you the whole story. We’re conditioned to believe that five bars is perfection and a single bar is the apocalypse dawning, but those Wi-Fi signal bars and measurements aren’t doing what you think.

Why I stopped trusting the Wi-Fi signal bars (mostly)

Wi-Fi bars aren’t a standard

Given Wi-Fi bars are the most common way to figure out how good your Wi-Fi reception is, it feels like their measurements are enshrined in some sort of standard.

That’s not the case. Each manufacturer decides on the device thresholds for what measures as one Wi-Fi bar, what displays as three, and so on, and there is no single IEEE spec that dictates how signal mapping works.

You can see it yourself. Put your smartphone, laptop, and tablet next to the same access point, and one of them will probably show a different set of Wi-Fi signal bar strength than the rest.

It’s also why at times you can have a device with a full five bars of signal, yet still be absolutely crawling and pulling your hair out. But the bars are doing exactly what they should do — and that’s reporting on signal strength, not the data it’s carrying.

Link rate is what truly shows how good your connection is

It bundles what the bars leave out

Link rate — also called PHY rate, shown as a plain Mbps figure — is what your device and the access point negotiate for the current connection.

The speed rate is built from what’s known as the MCS index, which combines the modulation type and coding rate, the number of streams currently being used from the router, and the Wi-Fi channel width, to give you a specific value on the data you can use.

It all adds up to give you a specific link rate, which is a hard value. So, when your device link rate drops from 800MB/s to 400MB/s, your device is specifically saying you’re receiving less bandwidth than before — but you might still have five full bars of signal.

Now, link rate isn’t foolproof either, it has to be said. That’s largely because link rate is a negotiated ceiling, not a guaranteed level of Wi-Fi speed. I’m sure you’ve run enough Wi-Fi speed tests to know that you rarely pull down the full bandwidth allowance you buy from your ISP, and that’s similar to what’s happening here, too.

Real-world Wi-Fi speeds often deliver around 40-60 percent of the negotiated link rate, which means overall, you’re still going to be feeling slower than the advertised Wi-Fi speeds, even with a full set of signal bars on a super-fast network.

Check the link rate instead of signal strength

It’s easiest on your router, but most devices can show the data

On your home network, most routers have a page that shows connected Wi-Fi clients, which in turn reveals per-device link rates. You might even find some tasty extra information (as I did!) that reveals even more about your connection quality, and perfectly illustrates what I’m talking about.

For example, in row 10 of the image above, you see DESKTOP-LKUCKS0, which is the laptop I’m writing on. It shows that I’m using a 5GHz Wi-Fi band using 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6), with an RX RATE of 216.0 and TX RATE of 144.0, with a Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) of 11.

There are two key bits here. One is the RX and TX Rate. In this case, my laptop negotiated for a 216Mbps connection, but is only receiving around 144Mbps. The second is the SNR of 11, which shows a moderate amount of signal interference holding back my connection.

The funny thing is, I’m not sitting too far away from my router. It’s around five meters at most, but through a closed door and brick wall, and the kids are home for holidays, eating up the network, too.

It just shows how it all really adds up.

Where to find link rate on other devices

You can check the link rate on your devices, too; you just need to know where to look:

• Windows: Head to Settings > Network & internet > Wi-Fi, click the connected network, then scroll down, and you’ll see the Aggregated link speed.
• macOS: On a Mac, hold Option and click the Wi-Fi icon in the menu bar. The drop-down lists Tx Rate alongside RSSI, noise, and channel.
• Linux: On most distros, you can open a terminal, then use the iw dev link command to find the link rate, swapping out “interface” for your adapter name.
• Android: The steps for Android devices vary between manufacturers, but you’ll roughly be heading to Settings > Network & internet > Wi-Fi. From there, select your network, scroll down, and check out the Transmit (TX) and Receive (RX) link speed rates.

Unfortunately, iOS doesn’t have a native way to expose this information. You’ll need an app like Wi-Fi SweetSpots to reveal that information.

As part of a wider check, it can be useful

There is one final tool you can use, but like signal strength, it doesn’t give you the full picture. The Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) is the dBm reading you’ve perhaps spotted alongside the signal bars and link rate figures.

It typically shows what looks like a negative number, such as -50, displayed similarly to decibel sound. However, it doesn’t measure the sound of your Wi-Fi. Instead, it measures how much power reaches your Wi-Fi router’s antenna.

That’s exactly why you can’t rely on RSSI to give you the full picture of Wi-Fi throughput. It only really knows about the network strength, and specifically within that measurement. RSSI can’t realistically tell you about other issues with the network, such as congestion, channel overlapping, and similar, because that data doesn’t exist within its measurement parameters.

You can use an app like WiFi Analyzer to figure out your signal strength, as well as fix Wi-Fi issues and much more, all for free.

Signal bars aren’t entirely awful, but you need more data

So, with all of that said, when it comes to measuring Wi-Fi, signal bars aren’t completely useless. Moving closer to the Wi-Fi source is typically not a bad thing; nor is removing interference from the router to the device, because it reduces other types of signal noise.

In that, use the information together, and you’ll get much better Wi-Fi, and that’s something we can all get behind.