What Is a Good RSRP, RSRQ and SINR? 4G and 5G Signal Strength Explained

Open the status page of a 4G or 5G modem, the field test screen of a phone or the log from a drive test and you get three numbers: RSRP, RSRQ and SINR. Search for what they mean and much the same table comes back from site after site, with an RSRP better than -80 dBm marked excellent and anything below -100 dBm marked poor.

That table is a useful starting point, but nobody standardised it. 3GPP, the body that writes the 4G and 5G specifications, defines exactly what each number measures and the range a phone can report, and it never says which values are good. The thresholds come from equipment vendors, and they differ from one vendor to the next. They also hide the three facts that matter most when you are trying to work out why a connection is slow: RSRP is the power in one narrow slice of the signal, RSRQ moves with how busy the cell is even when your signal has not changed, and SINR is the number that actually decides your speed.

This guide gives you the table first, then explains each number from its 3GPP definition, shows how to read the three together, and covers how to check them on a phone or modem and what to do about a poor reading. Every worked figure comes from the free RSRP, RSRQ & SINR Calculator, so you can reproduce any of them.

The Short Answer

These are the bands Teltonika Networks publishes for its routers, and the noIM₃ calculator uses the same bands to label its results. They are industry convention, not a standard.

The calculator calls the third row fair, and it labels anything below -110 dBm no service. Other vendors draw the lines elsewhere: Digi rates a 4G RSRP of -90 to -105 dBm as good and only calls it no signal below -120 dBm. Whichever table you use, three rules matter more than the table does.

• RSRP is how strong the cell is. It is the power in one 15 kHz resource element, not the whole channel, which is why it reads about 30 dB below the total signal on a 20 MHz carrier.
• RSRQ is how much of what you receive is your own cell’s reference signal. It falls as the cell gets busy, even when nothing about your signal has changed. On a fully loaded cell with no interference it settles between about -11 and -13 dB, so a reading much worse than that means interference or noise is part of the measurement.
• SINR is how clean the signal is, and it sets your speed. Good RSRP with poor SINR is an interference problem, and more signal will not fix it.

A phone also keeps working well below -100 dBm. The minimum receiver sensitivity that 3GPP sets for a 4G phone works out at about -122 dBm per resource element on Band 3 (1800 MHz) and Band 28 (700 MHz), two bands widely used in Australia. A phone that only just meets the specification therefore still decodes data below -120 dBm, as long as the channel is clean.

What RSRP, RSRQ and SINR Measure

A 4G carrier is divided into resource elements: one subcarrier 15 kHz wide for the duration of one OFDM symbol. Twelve subcarriers make a resource block of 180 kHz, and a 20 MHz carrier has 100 resource blocks, or 1200 subcarriers. Scattered through that grid in fixed positions are the cell-specific reference signals, which the base station transmits whether or not anyone is using the cell. All three measurements are taken on, or relative to, those reference signals. The definitions are in 3GPP TS 36.214.

RSRP (Reference Signal Received Power) is the average power of one reference signal resource element, in dBm. Clause 5.1.1 defines it as “the linear average over the power contributions (in [W]) of the resource elements that carry cell-specific reference signals within the considered measurement frequency bandwidth”. It tells you how strong the serving cell is at your location, and nothing else.

RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) is the total power the receiver sees across the measurement bandwidth. In the definition that RSRQ uses, it counts power “from all sources, including co-channel serving and non-serving cells, adjacent channel interference, thermal noise etc.” Unless the network says otherwise, it is measured only in the OFDM symbols that carry reference signals.

RSRQ (Reference Signal Received Quality) is defined in clause 5.1.3 as “the ratio N×RSRP/(E-UTRA carrier RSSI), where N is the number of RB’s of the E-UTRA carrier RSSI measurement bandwidth”. It is a ratio, so it is in dB, and in the normal reporting range it is always negative, because one resource element is always a small part of the whole.

SINR (Signal to Interference plus Noise Ratio) is the reference signal power divided by the interference and noise in the same resource elements. 3GPP added it to LTE as RS-SINR in Release 13 (clause 5.1.23), years after RSRP and RSRQ, and TS 36.306 makes it an optional capability. So the SINR your modem shows may be the standard RS-SINR, or it may be the chipset’s own estimate. Android, for example, reports an LTE “reference signal signal-to-noise ratio” from -20 to +30 dB.

What Is a Good RSRP?

By the usual bands, an RSRP of -90 dBm or better is good, -90 to -100 dBm is fair to poor, and below -100 dBm is poor. To read your own number sensibly, though, you need two facts the table leaves out.

RSRP is about 30 dB below the total signal

Because RSRP is the power in one resource element, a cell’s transmit power is shared across every subcarrier before any of it reaches you. The difference between the total and one element is 10 × log₁₀(12 × N), where N is the number of resource blocks, so it depends only on the channel bandwidth:

A 20 W (43 dBm) cell on a 20 MHz carrier therefore puts 12.2 dBm into each resource element at the antenna. After 110 dB of path loss, a phone reports an RSRP of -97.8 dBm.

The same offset explains the gap between RSRP and RSSI on a modem’s status page. On a fully loaded 20 MHz cell, RSSI sits about 30.8 dB above RSRP, so an RSRP of -100 dBm and an RSSI of -69 dBm describe the same signal. RSSI is not a better measure of strength; it just adds up more of the channel, including whatever interference is in it.

How low RSRP can go

What limits a receiver is not RSRP itself but RSRP compared with the noise in the same resource element. Thermal noise in 15 kHz at room temperature is -174 + 10 × log₁₀(15 000) = -132.2 dBm, and the receiver adds its noise figure on top. With a noise figure of 7 dB, the noise in each resource element is -125.2 dBm. That sets the best SINR a given RSRP can deliver, with no interference at all:

That is why a phone at -110 dBm can be perfectly usable in a quiet rural area while a phone at -85 dBm crawls in a dense city. The city has interference, and the table above leaves it out. If you want the background to the -174 dBm/Hz figure, our guide to the noise floor and receiver sensitivity works through it.

3GPP sets the floor from the other direction. TS 36.101 Table 7.3.1-1 gives the reference sensitivity a 4G phone must meet: the lowest total power at each antenna port at which it still delivers 95 per cent of its maximum throughput on a QPSK test channel. For Band 3 at 20 MHz that is -91 dBm, and for Band 28 at 10 MHz it is -95.5 dBm. Spread across the subcarriers of each carrier, those work out at about -122 and -123 dBm per resource element. That is our arithmetic rather than a figure 3GPP prints, but it shows how much room there is below the usual “poor” line.

What a phone can report, and how many bars that is

A phone reports RSRP in 1 dB steps. TS 36.133 clause 9.1.4 originally defined the range as -140 to -44 dBm, and later releases extended it down to -156 dBm. An RSRP stronger than -44 dBm is reported as -44 dBm, which happens only very close to a cell.

Signal bars are a separate scale again. On Android the default thresholds in the platform source code are -128, -118, -108 and -98 dBm RSRP, and carriers can override them. By default an RSRP of -98 dBm or better shows full bars, -108 to -98 dBm shows three of four, and -118 to -108 dBm shows two. So a phone at -110 dBm, which the vendor table calls poor, shows two bars on a stock Android phone. Bars are a user interface choice, not a measurement, so compare the dBm figure rather than the bars.

What Is a Good RSRQ?

By the usual bands, an RSRQ of -10 dB or better is excellent, -10 to -15 dB is good, -15 to -20 dB is fair to poor, and anything below -20 dB is poor. RSRQ is the most misread of the three, because it changes with two things at once: interference, and how busy your own cell is.

RSRQ falls when the cell gets busy

The reference signals are always on, but the data resource elements carry power only when the cell has traffic to send. RSRP is measured on the reference signals, so it does not change with load. RSSI counts every element that carries power, so it rises as the cell fills. RSRQ divides one by the other, so it falls, with nothing about your radio path changing. These are the calculator’s results for a single antenna port cell, an RSRP of -100 dBm, no interference and a 7 dB noise figure:

The two ends of that table are exact. An empty single port cell lights 2 of the 12 subcarriers in the symbol, which gives 10 × log₁₀(1/2) = -3.0 dB, and a full one lights all 12, which gives 10 × log₁₀(1/12) = -10.8 dB. Researchers at TU Wien derived the same figures when they set out to estimate cell load from RSRQ. The top of the original RSRQ reporting range is -3 dB, which is exactly an empty single port cell.

Many cells transmit from two antenna ports, and then the numbers move a little. An empty two port cell reads about -6 dB, because both ports’ reference signals are in the measured symbol. A fully loaded one reads between about -10.8 and -13 dB, depending on how much power the operator puts into each antenna’s data relative to its reference signals. The calculator models the -10.8 dB case, where the data power is split between the two antennas. The TU Wien paper works the -13 dB case, where each antenna sends data at the same power as its reference signals.

That gives the most useful rule for reading RSRQ. Unless the network sends data at a higher power than its reference signals, cell load on its own cannot push RSRQ much below -11 to -13 dB. A reading worse than that means interference or noise is part of the measurement.

What RSRQ says about SINR

On a fully loaded cell, RSRQ and SINR are tied together. If interference and noise are spread evenly across the subcarriers, which is the model the calculator uses, then RSRQ sits below -10.8 dB by 10 × log₁₀(1 + 1/SINR) dB, with SINR taken as a plain ratio rather than in dB. That turns an RSRQ reading into an estimate of SINR:

On a two port cell where each antenna sends data at the same power as its reference signals, each RSRQ in the left column sits up to about 2 dB lower for the same SINR. Either way, set this beside the conventional bands and they disagree. An RSRQ of -15 dB is still labelled good, yet on a busy cell it implies a SINR of about 0 dB or less, which the SINR band calls poor. On a lightly loaded cell, the same -15 dB implies a lower SINR still.

RSRQ is a sound alarm, because a falling RSRQ means something has changed. It cannot tell you whether the cause is congestion or interference. SINR can, because cell load does not move it.

What a phone can report

TS 36.133 clause 9.1.7 originally defined the RSRQ reporting range as -19.5 to -3 dB in 0.5 dB steps. Release 12 extended it to -34 to +2.5 dB for phones that support the wider range. The positive values only arise when the network asks the phone to measure RSSI over every symbol rather than only the reference signal symbols.

What Is a Good SINR?

By the usual bands, a SINR of 20 dB or better is excellent, 13 to 20 dB is good, 0 to 13 dB is fair to poor, and below 0 dB is poor. SINR is the number that best predicts your throughput, because it decides which modulation and coding rate the network can schedule for you.

The mechanism is the channel quality indicator (CQI). The phone reports the highest CQI index at which, in the words of TS 36.213 clause 7.2.3, a transport block “could be received with a transport block error probability not exceeding 0.1”. Each index is a modulation and a code rate, from QPSK at CQI 1 to 64QAM at CQI 15. The standard does not say which SINR corresponds to which CQI. That mapping lives in each chipset’s receiver.

What 3GPP does publish is a model for system studies. TR 36.942 Annex A.1 approximates the downlink with an attenuated Shannon bound: throughput is 0.6 × log₂(1 + SINR) bits per second per hertz, zero below -10 dB and capped at 4.4 bit/s/Hz, which the model reaches at about 22 dB. The parameters assume two receive antennas, a typical urban channel and HARQ retransmissions.

Running the CQI table through the same model shows where each modulation starts:

The conventional bands line up with this well. Fair to poor, 0 to 13 dB, is QPSK and 16QAM territory. Good starts at about the SINR where 64QAM does, and excellent, at 20 dB, is close to where the model stops gaining. Treat the SINR column as a model rather than a threshold, because a real receiver may do better or worse, but the shape is right: every few dB of SINR buys a step of modulation, and an extra 10 dB of RSRP buys nothing if the SINR does not move. The LTE Throughput & Resource Grid Calculator reads the scheduled peak from the 3GPP transport block tables and puts the TR 36.942 rate at your SINR beside it, and our guide to spectral efficiency and Shannon capacity explains the bound itself.

When the phone reports the standard RS-SINR, TS 36.133 clause 9.1.17 gives a range of -23 to 40 dB in 0.5 dB steps.

What Is a Good RSRP for 5G? SS-RSRP, SS-RSRQ and SS-SINR

5G uses the same three ideas under slightly different names, defined in 3GPP TS 38.215. The difference is what they are measured on. 5G has no always-on reference signal across the whole carrier. Instead, it measures on the synchronisation signal block (SSB), a block of 240 subcarriers by 4 OFDM symbols that the cell sends periodically.

• SS-RSRP is the linear average of the power in the resource elements that carry the secondary synchronisation signals (clause 5.1.1).
• SS-RSRQ is N × SS-RSRP divided by the NR carrier RSSI, over N resource blocks (clause 5.1.3), exactly as in 4G.
• SS-SINR is the power of the secondary synchronisation signal elements divided by the noise and interference in the same elements (clause 5.1.5).

The reporting ranges are wider than in 4G. TS 38.133 gives SS-RSRP from -156 to -31 dBm, SS-RSRQ from -43 to +20 dB and SS-SINR from -23 to 40 dB. There is no 3GPP quality scale for these either. The bands people use are close to the 4G ones. Digi’s bands, for example, rate a 5G RSRP above -80 dBm as excellent, -80 to -90 dBm as very good and -90 to -105 dBm as good.

Three things make a 5G reading behave differently from a 4G one.

The subcarrier can be twice as wide. On band n78 (3.3 to 3.8 GHz), the SSB uses 30 kHz subcarriers, according to TS 38.101-1 Table 5.4.3.3-1. Bands n1, n3 and n28 use 15 kHz. A 30 kHz resource element collects twice the power of a 15 kHz one at the same power spectral density, so SS-RSRP on n78 reads 3 dB higher than an LTE RSRP would for the same signal. The noise in the element doubles too (-122.2 dBm with a 7 dB noise figure, against -125.2 dBm), so the SINR is unchanged. Hold an n78 reading against a 4G table and it looks about 3 dB better than it is.

The SSB can be beamformed. A 5G cell can send its SSB as a sweep of beams, each pointing in a different direction. When it does, SS-RSRP describes the beams your device hears best, not the cell as a whole, and it can change sharply as you move across the beam pattern.

On a non-standalone connection, the phone may show 4G. Many 5G connections run as non-standalone, with a 4G anchor carrying the control signalling alongside the 5G carrier. Android’s default configuration uses the LTE signal as the primary measure on such a connection, so the bars and the headline dBm figure may describe the 4G anchor rather than the 5G carrier. On a standalone 5G connection, Android’s default SS-RSRP thresholds for its bars are -110, -90, -80 and -65 dBm, which is a much stricter scale than the 4G one.

How to Check Your RSRP, RSRQ and SINR

On Android. On most phones, open Settings, then About phone, then SIM status, and look at Signal strength. Samsung phones put it under About device or About phone, then Status, then SIM card status. The figure is shown as something like “-97 dBm 43 asu”. On a 4G connection the dBm figure is the RSRP, because Android’s getDbm() for an LTE cell “returns the RSRP of the measured cell”. The asu figure is the same number on a different scale: Android computes it as RSRP + 140, from 0 to 97. Signal monitoring apps can read RSRQ and the reference signal SNR from the same interface.

On iPhone. Apple has no settings screen for this, but Field Test Mode shows it. Open the Phone app, dial *3001#12345#* and press call. From iOS 14 onwards, it opens on a dashboard; tap the list icon for All Metrics and look under the LTE entries, such as Serving Cell Meas, for the RSRP and related values. Apple moves these between iOS versions and modem types, and some versions do not show 5G RSRP at all, so if you cannot find a field it may simply not be exposed on your phone.

On a 4G or 5G modem or router. 4G and 5G routers and fixed wireless modems usually show all three on their status page. On a Teltonika router they are under Status, Network, Mobile. A modem is the best tool for reading them, because it sits still, which takes out the fluctuation you see as you walk around with a phone.

Reading the Three Together

One number on its own rarely tells you what is wrong. The pattern across all three usually does.

The calculator shows how differently the numbers move. Take an RSRP of -95 dBm on a half loaded two port cell. With no interference, the SINR is 30.2 dB and the RSRQ is -9.0 dB. Now add co-channel interference of -100 dBm per subcarrier. That is the level a fully loaded neighbouring cell delivers when it arrives 5 dB weaker than yours. The SINR falls to 5.0 dB, while the RSRQ moves only to -10.7 dB, and RSRP does not change at all. The phone shows the same signal strength, the RSRQ is still labelled good, and under the TR 36.942 model the link now carries a little over a quarter of what it did.

How to Improve a Poor Signal

Work out which problem you have first. Use the pattern above. Adding signal to an interference problem makes the RSRP look better without making the connection any faster.

For a weak signal, add gain where it counts. An external antenna raises RSRP by its gain less the loss in the cable that feeds it. A 10 dBi antenna on a cable with 4 dB of loss gives you a net 6 dB over a 0 dBi antenna at the modem, and a long run of thin cable can erase the gain entirely. Height often helps more than gain, because it clears the terrain and buildings between you and the cell. Our guides to antenna gain and specifying coaxial cable cover both halves of that sum.

For interference, add directivity, not gain. An omnidirectional antenna with more gain lifts the interfering cells by exactly as much as the wanted one, so the SINR does not change. A directional antenna pointed at the serving cell rejects cells in other directions, and that is what raises the SINR. Poynting’s installation guidance for its directional LTE antennas is to test in 45 degree steps around the full circle, take the best direction as a baseline, then test again 20 degrees either side of it. Judge each position on SINR first and RSRP second, because the strongest direction is not always the cleanest one.

In Australia, do not use a booster. The ACMA states that mobile phone boosters are illegal and that a mobile phone repeater must be authorised by the telco before it is legal to use. Telcos supply approved repeaters for poor coverage. An external antenna connected to your own modem is a different thing, because it re-transmits nothing.

A Worked Example in the Calculator

Open the RSRP, RSRQ & SINR Calculator and pick the Macro, half loaded preset. It describes a 43 dBm cell on a 20 MHz carrier with two antenna ports, 110 dB of path loss, 50 per cent load and a 7 dB noise figure. The calculator lays out the RSRP derivation as a running total: 43 dBm, less 30.8 dB of spreading across 1200 subcarriers, less 110 dB of path loss, gives -97.8 dBm. The RSSI is -68.8 dBm, the RSRQ is -9.0 dB and the RS-SINR is 27.5 dB.

Now switch to Busy, interfered. The path loss rises to 125 dB, the cell is fully loaded and there is co-channel interference of -118 dBm per subcarrier. The RSRP falls to -112.8 dBm, which is below -110 dBm, so the calculator labels it no service. Yet the RS-SINR is 4.5 dB, which is QPSK territory and still carries data, about 1.15 bit/s/Hz under the TR 36.942 model. The RSRQ, at -12.1 dB, is still labelled good, and its value only makes sense once you know the cell is full.

Two more things are worth trying. Drag the load slider and watch RSRQ move while RSRP and RS-SINR stay exactly where they are. Then enter an RSRP from your own modem in the From a measurement mode, set the load and interference you think apply, and see whether the RSRQ the calculator predicts matches the one your modem reports. If it does not, the difference is telling you something about the load or the interference that the RSRP alone never will.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is -100 dBm RSRP good? It is on the boundary between fair and poor on the most widely used scale. It is usable: with no interference and a typical 7 dB receiver noise figure it still leaves about 25 dB of SINR, comfortably above the 13.5 dB at which the TR 36.942 model reaches 64QAM. A stock Android phone shows three of four bars at -100 dBm. Whether it is fast depends on the SINR, not the RSRP.

Is -110 dBm RSRP usable? Usually, yes. It is weak, and most vendor tables call it poor, but with no interference it still leaves about 15 dB of SINR. A stock Android phone shows two bars. The 3GPP minimum sensitivity for a 4G phone works out at about -122 dBm per resource element, so a connection at -110 dBm has real margin left in a clean channel. It becomes unreliable when interference is present as well.

What is a good RSRP for 5G? 5G uses SS-RSRP, measured on the synchronisation signal block, and the bands people use are close to the 4G ones. On Digi’s published scale, for example, above -80 dBm is excellent, -80 to -90 dBm is very good and -90 to -105 dBm is good. On band n78 at 3.5 GHz, SS-RSRP is measured on 30 kHz subcarriers and reads about 3 dB higher than a 4G RSRP would for the same signal, so allow for that when you compare the two.

Why is my signal strong but my internet slow? Either the SINR is poor or the cell is busy. A strong RSRP with a low SINR means interference from other cells, which more signal will not fix; a directional antenna aimed at one cell usually does. A strong RSRP with a good SINR and an RSRQ around -11 to -13 dB means the cell is congested, and the only cure is a different cell, a different band or a quieter time.

What is the difference between RSSI and RSRP? RSRP is the power of a single reference signal resource element, 15 kHz wide. RSSI is the total power across the measurement bandwidth from every source, including other cells, adjacent channels and noise. On a fully loaded 20 MHz cell, RSSI is about 30.8 dB higher than RSRP. RSSI rises with traffic and interference, so it is a poor measure of how strong the serving cell is.

Why is RSRQ always negative? RSRQ compares one resource element of reference signal with the total power across a whole resource block of 12 elements, plus interference and noise, so the ratio is almost always less than one. In the original reporting range it runs from -19.5 to -3 dB. An extended range up to +2.5 dB exists for when the network has the phone measure RSSI over every symbol, but most readings you see will be negative.

What SINR do I need for 64QAM? 3GPP does not set one; each chipset maps SINR to a channel quality indicator in its own way. Under the TR 36.942 model that 3GPP uses for system studies, the spectral efficiency of the lowest 64QAM channel quality indicator is reached at about 13.5 dB, the lowest 16QAM one at about 6.5 dB, and the lowest QPSK one at about -7 dB.

What does asu mean on an Android phone? Asu stands for arbitrary strength unit. For a 4G connection Android computes it as RSRP + 140, so it runs from 0 at -140 dBm to 97 at -43 dBm. An asu of 40 is an RSRP of -100 dBm.

Are mobile phone boosters legal in Australia? No. The ACMA states that mobile phone boosters are illegal, and that a mobile phone repeater must be authorised by the telco before it is legal to use. Telcos supply authorised repeaters for poor coverage. An external antenna connected directly to your own modem does not re-transmit, so it is a different device.

How do I calculate RSRP from a transmitter’s power? Take the total transmit power in dBm, subtract 10 × log₁₀(12 × N) for the N resource blocks of the channel (30.8 dB for 20 MHz), add any reference signal power boost, and subtract the path loss. A 43 dBm cell on 20 MHz with 110 dB of path loss gives an RSRP of -97.8 dBm.

Try the Numbers

The RSRP, RSRQ & SINR Calculator computes all four quantities to the TS 36.214 definitions, from a cell’s power and path loss or from an RSRP you have measured. It itemises the RSSI into the serving cell, interference and noise, sweeps the load and the measurement bandwidth beside the headline result, and flags any RSRP or RSRQ a phone could never report. It is free with a noIM₃ account.

When you need the path loss itself, the LTE Link Budget & MAPL Calculator builds the uplink and downlink budgets, and the LTE Cell Range & Coverage Estimator turns them into a cell radius across ten propagation models. The LTE Throughput & Resource Grid Calculator reads the peak from the 3GPP transport block tables and adds the TR 36.942 rate at a SINR you state, and the noise floor calculator handles the thermal noise and noise figure side.

For related reading, What Is the Noise Floor? explains where -174 dBm/Hz comes from, How to Calculate an RF Link Budget follows the path from transmitter to RSRP, and What Is RF Interference and Why It’s Getting Worse covers the sources that pull SINR down.

Notes on Sources

The definitions, reporting ranges, sensitivity figures and CQI table were read from the ETSI editions of the 3GPP specifications listed below, and the quoted sentences are as they appear in those editions. The quality bands are attributed to the vendors who publish them, because no 3GPP document contains one. The RSRQ and SINR tables, the load figures and the worked examples were computed with the noIM₃ RSRP, RSRQ & SINR Calculator. The relationship between RSSI, load and interference behind them is a model, which the calculator labels as such. The per resource element sensitivity figures, the 3 dB comparison for 30 kHz subcarriers and the SINR at which each CQI is reached are our own arithmetic from the published figures.

• ETSI TS 136 214 V19.0.0 (2025-10), LTE; E-UTRA; Physical layer; Measurements (3GPP TS 36.214 Release 19). Clause 5.1.1 for RSRP; clause 5.1.3 for RSRQ and the E-UTRA carrier RSSI, including the reference signal symbols it is measured in; clause 5.1.23 for RS-SINR, which first appears in the Release 13 edition.
• ETSI TS 136 133 V19.6.0 (2026-10), LTE; E-UTRA; Requirements for support of radio resource management (3GPP TS 36.133). Clause 9.1.4 and Table 9.1.4-1 for the RSRP reporting range of -156 to -44 dBm, against -140 to -44 dBm in Release 8; clause 9.1.7 and Table 9.1.7-1 for the RSRQ range of -34 to 2.5 dB, against -19.5 to -3 dB in Release 8; clause 9.1.17.1 for the RS-SINR range of -23 to 40 dB.
• ETSI TS 136 211 V19.3.0 (2026-04), LTE; E-UTRA; Physical channels and modulation (3GPP TS 36.211). Table 6.2.3-1 for the 15 kHz subcarrier spacing and 12 subcarriers per resource block; clause 6.10.1.2 for the reference signal positions.
• ETSI TS 136 101 V19.6.0 (2026-08), LTE; E-UTRA; User Equipment (UE) radio transmission and reception (3GPP TS 36.101). Table 5.6-1 for the resource blocks per channel bandwidth; clause 7.3 and Table 7.3.1-1 for the reference sensitivity, including -91 dBm for Band 3 at 20 MHz and -95.5 dBm for Band 28 at 10 MHz.
• ETSI TS 136 213 V19.5.0 (2026-09), LTE; E-UTRA; Physical layer procedures (3GPP TS 36.213). Clause 7.2.3 for the 0.1 block error probability that defines a CQI; Table 7.2.3-1 for the 4-bit CQI table.
• ETSI TS 136 306 V19.3.0 (2026-08), LTE; E-UTRA; User Equipment (UE) radio access capabilities (3GPP TS 36.306). Clause 4.3.6.13 for RS-SINR measurement as an optional UE capability; clause 4.3.6.12 for the extended RSRQ upper range tied to RSRQ measured on all OFDM symbols.
• ETSI TR 136 942 V19.0.0 (2025-10), LTE; E-UTRA; Radio Frequency (RF) system scenarios (3GPP TR 36.942). Annex A.1 and Table A.1 for the attenuated Shannon bound and its downlink parameters: α of 0.6, minimum SINR of -10 dB and a ceiling of 4.4 bit/s/Hz.
• ETSI TS 138 215 V19.4.0 (2026-09), 5G; NR; Physical layer measurements (3GPP TS 38.215). Clauses 5.1.1, 5.1.3 and 5.1.5 for SS-RSRP, SS-RSRQ and SS-SINR.
• ETSI TS 138 133 V19.6.0 (2026-10), 5G; NR; Requirements for support of radio resource management (3GPP TS 38.133). Tables 10.1.6.1-1, 10.1.11.1-1 and 10.1.16.1-1 for the SS-RSRP, SS-RSRQ and SS-SINR reporting ranges.
• ETSI TS 138 211 V19.5.0 (2026-09), 5G; NR; Physical channels and modulation (3GPP TS 38.211), clause 7.4.3.1 for the SS/PBCH block of 4 OFDM symbols and 240 subcarriers; and ETSI TS 138 101-1 V19.7.0 (2026-10), 5G; NR; User Equipment (UE) radio transmission and reception; Part 1: Range 1 Standalone (3GPP TS 38.101-1), Table 5.4.3.3-1 for the 30 kHz SSB subcarrier spacing on n78 and 15 kHz on n1, n3 and n28.
• Philipp Raida, Martin Lerch, Philipp Svoboda and Markus Rupp, “Deriving Cell Load from RSRQ Measurements”, TMA 2018 Network Traffic Measurement and Analysis Conference, for the -3.01 and -10.79 dB single port figures and the -6.02 and -13.01 dB two port figures, which assume data sent at the same power as the reference signals.
• Teltonika Networks wiki, Mobile Signal Strength Recommendations, as read in September 2026, for the RSRP, RSRQ and SINR bands in the first table.
• Digi International, EX50 user guide, cell signal strength page, updated June 2026, for the 4G and 5G bands quoted.
• Android developer reference, CellSignalStrengthLte and CellSignalStrengthNr, for getDbm() returning RSRP, the asu calculation and the RSSNR range; and the Android Open Source Project source of CarrierConfigManager, for the default LTE RSRP bar thresholds of -128, -118, -108 and -98 dBm, the default 5G SS-RSRP thresholds of -110, -90, -80 and -65 dBm, and the default use of LTE as the primary measure on non-standalone 5G.
• Jason Cross in Macworld, March 2019, and Stuart Sweet on the Solid Signal blog, November 2023, on the iPhone Field Test app, for the dial code and the changes to it between iOS versions; Gadget Hacks for the iOS 14 dashboard and All Metrics view.
• Poynting, How To Orientate A Directional LTE Antenna During Installation, for the 45 degree sweep and the 20 degree refinement.
• Australian Communications and Media Authority, Using mobile phone boosters and repeaters, for the statement that boosters are illegal and that repeaters must be authorised by a telco.