"...." iPhone status icon?

I could be mistaken, but it just means as it says, you don’t have service, thus you don’t have any bars. Once you get a bar or two or three or four, those dots will change to this.

2FC067E4-7DF1-4447-93BF-0F246D83FAEF.jpeg
 
Sometimes it says "No service" without the "....".
 
We’re in the DC area and for the first time saw 5Ge on our iPhones (upper right below):

upload_2019-9-20_10-28-19.png

Had to Google what it meant. In short, it’s an almost fraudulent use of “5G” which current iPhones can’t receive. Yes, it’s fast, but no way 5G fast. Shame on Apple for introducing confusing terminology.
 
There is a KITT-style animation when it's actively searching for a network, so my guess is the "...." means it is between retries.
 
To answer your question, yes, the iPhone is a status icon!
 
It seems to me that the 5G rollout is a lot more haphazard and disjointed than previous upgrades.

Rich
 
RJM62 said:
It seems to me that the 5G rollout is a lot more haphazard and disjointed than previous upgrades.
Click to expand...
Nah. It's par for the course from the wireless industry. For reference, go read the history of how HSPA was marketed as 4G.
 
FastEddieB said:
We’re in the DC area and for the first time saw 5Ge on our iPhones (upper right below):

View attachment 78005

Had to Google what it meant. In short, it’s an almost fraudulent use of “5G” which current iPhones can’t receive. Yes, it’s fast, but no way 5G fast. Shame on Apple for introducing confusing terminology.
Click to expand...

darrell said:
I wouldn't blame Apple for that as much as AT&T:

https://www.macrumors.com/guide/5ge/
Click to expand...

Yeah. AT&T started this back when Verizon had LTE and AT&T did not. To be fair, VZ and ATT were using different technologies at the time, and ATT upgraded to HSPA which most of the industry considered to be "3.5G" but ATT went hardcore marketing and "4G" started to appear on phones... Then, everyone went to LTE and the phones just said "LTE". This is the same sort of thing - It's really 4.5G, not 5G, but AT&T wants you to think they've got the best network.

Spoiler alert: They don't. It seems to have gotten noticeably worse since they began upgrading. I am getting worse signal than I used to at least half the time on AT&T, and there are more places where I have no signal. If the rest of their "upgrade" goes this well I might have to switch back to VZ.
 
RJM62 said:
It seems to me that the 5G rollout is a lot more haphazard and disjointed than previous upgrades.

Rich
Click to expand...
It is really rushed. If you look at the press, 2019/2020 was supposed to be the early release, but there was a rush in the latter half of 2018 to put out some 5G. Verizon created a proprietary technology that they had hoped would be adopted by the industry, but in the 2015/16 period no one, not even the companies that worked with them on it, wanted it for what is now called 5G. FWIW the inside industry term is NR for New Radio. When the basic of NR were discussed the numerologies that were associated with the Verizon idea (75kHz Sub-carrier spacing especially) did not lend itself to the adaptability that was needed to meet the three main use cases: ehanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), massive Machine Type Communication (eMTC), and Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLCC). The best SCS was 2^n*15kHz which would give SCSs of 15khz, 30kHz, 60kHz, etc. and make mixed numerology carriers in the same frequency band much easier to deal with plus where NR had to coexist with LTE much easier as LTE uses a SCS of 15kHz. Making Dynamic Spectrum Sharing possible and this would be a big game-changer for rolling out the NR carriers into band where LTE was already deployed.

It is coming though. Watch for the end of this year and next year to really see a lot. The first handheld devices just came out a few months ago. BTW AT&T still is not selling a 5G phone even though they say they have some 5G deployed. LOL!
 
flyingcheesehead said:
Yeah. AT&T started this back when Verizon had LTE and AT&T did not. To be fair, VZ and ATT were using different technologies at the time, and ATT upgraded to HSPA which most of the industry considered to be "3.5G" but ATT went hardcore marketing and "4G" started to appear on phones... Then, everyone went to LTE and the phones just said "LTE". This is the same sort of thing - It's really 4.5G, not 5G, but AT&T wants you to think they've got the best network.

Spoiler alert: They don't. It seems to have gotten noticeably worse since they began upgrading. I am getting worse signal than I used to at least half the time on AT&T, and there are more places where I have no signal. If the rest of their "upgrade" goes this well I might have to switch back to VZ.
Click to expand...

It has been going on for a long time!

Back when AT&T had a whole campaign around the 3G network, Sprint rolled out WiMAX and called it 4G. AT&T had kittens. For us greybeards we even remember Cingular talking about "Digital Voice Quality" when they rolled out TDMA in the early 90's. I can tell you the vocoders back then for mobile telephony did not do anything better than analog voice was doing. 8k vocoders sucked! It was not until the 13k Vocoder was used in the 1.9GHz PCS band then the 8k EVRC ones came out that people started sounding normal again!

Verizon's "more bars in more area" campaign was nothing more than they had specified 5-bars on the singal indicator for their phones when everyone else had 4-bars. There was no additional coverage.
 
ScottM said:
It is really rushed. If you look at the press, 2019/2020 was supposed to be the early release, but there was a rush in the latter half of 2018 to put out some 5G. Verizon created a proprietary technology that they had hoped would be adopted by the industry, but in the 2015/16 period no one, not even the companies that worked with them on it, wanted it for what is now called 5G. FWIW the inside industry term is NR for New Radio. When the basic of NR were discussed the numerologies that were associated with the Verizon idea (75kHz Sub-carrier spacing especially) did not lend itself to the adaptability that was needed to meet the three main use cases: ehanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB), massive Machine Type Communication (eMTC), and Ultra-Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLCC). The best SCS was 2^n*15kHz which would give SCSs of 15khz, 30kHz, 60kHz, etc. and make mixed numerology carriers in the same frequency band much easier to deal with plus where NR had to coexist with LTE much easier as LTE uses a SCS of 15kHz. Making Dynamic Spectrum Sharing possible and this would be a big game-changer for rolling out the NR carriers into band where LTE was already deployed.

It is coming though. Watch for the end of this year and next year to really see a lot. The first handheld devices just came out a few months ago. BTW AT&T still is not selling a 5G phone even though they say they have some 5G deployed. LOL!
Click to expand...

Thanks, Scott. That synopsis clears things up.

I occasionally do stationary wireless installations because a lot of the mountain roads here have no cable; and the DSL, where it's available, generally sucks. But I've been advising potential customers to hold off if they have at least DSL because I don't want to sell them something that may be obsolete soon.

Then again, I doubt 5G of any flavor will be arriving in Sparrow Fart any time soon; so maybe I should just fully disclose the possible obsolescence and do the work.

Rich
 
After several years with AT&T and what seemed like deteriorating coverage recently, I decided to test-drive Verizon with a spare phone. What I discovered was that for coverage, Verizon was generally no better in most areas and worse in some areas, and almost always significantly worse in LTE speed. I know that this contradicts all of the big wireless carrier “ratings” organizations, and may not be the case in every area of the country, but it was my experience years ago on Verizon and it appears that nothing has changed. Of course, every carrier has strong areas and weak areas, but I concluded that the trade-offs weren’t worth the switch for me. I left Verizon years ago because they had poor coverage at my house (still do), were the most expensive (still are), and had a penchant for wanting to grab as much control over the customer’s device and wireless experience as they could (still true, though the iPhone mitigates some of the latter issue).

Yes, AT&T is promoting fake 5G as they did with 4G and HSPA, but the HSPA(+) experience on AT&T was way better than the EV-DO experience on Verizon. Even though Verizon was supposed to start kicking regular folks off of their CDMA network later this year (since been pushed out, I believe), when I tested the spare phone recently there were still a surprising number of areas where I received only a “3G” or “1x” signal; I assume that they may redeploy those frequencies to LTE, but in those areas AT&T presently provides LTE or HSPA so it would be a risk for me to switch.

As to the dots for “No Service”, I saw that recently on my wife’s iPhone and thought it was counter intuitive.
 
Guess you’re not on the east coast, that no signal icon is like a icon of living there lol

Also 5G, meh, I can’t even get reception half the time, and it seems like 4g or edge is waaaay slower than it used to be, almost feels like they just change the symbol and then make everything else slower to make it look faster. Ether way with all this 20G max bandwidth super ultimate coverage, it almost feels like I get worse reception than I did 5 years ago.
 
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