Cell signal worse with custom ROM

[bad1080]

So I installed Lineage OS (LOS) on my Poco F1 and I was pretty happy with it. I noticed a little higher battery drain at first so I started to investigate since this made very little sense to me after getting rid of all the Xiaomi bloatware. But my cell reception seemed to be worse than under MIUI and sometimes when I pick up my phone it shows no reption at all but then recovers quickly and starts to show some bars. So I started to look further into that direction. I installed Better Battery Stats (BBS) which gives you a nice overview of the signal strength and how long the phone has been in each state. Sadly I had no screenshots from before when I still had MIUI but after seeing I had no reception for over 4h today I had to do something so I went back and installed MIUI again to have actual numbers.

Lineage OS (build 2018.11.27) cell signal strength collected over 10 days:
No/Unknown: ~1%
Poor: 22%
Moderate: 28%
Good: 46%
Great: ~3%

For reference, my phone is lying on my desk at day and next to my bed at night, besides that it gets moved very little. I live on the 5th floor in the inner city of Berlin, Germany and I am in close proximity (~500m) to at least 5 cell towers so my cell coverage is excellent.

I opened this thread here because the discussion in the Lineage OS thread moves too fast and no developers nor the OP was answering or even acknowledging this could be a problem. I myself have no idea why or how this would even be possible or make sense. And please understand I am not here to point fingers all I want is to understand it so it maybe can get fixed. Only a handful of people were complaining about this (some about mobile internet/LTE reception) so this might not be a widespread issue or people may not recognize it as one. A rumor I heard was that MIUI might be misrepresenting the actual reception status but without anything to back that up (and I am not sure if that would affect the BBS stats). More to this further down...

MIUI (beta 8.12.13) cell signal strength collected over only ~4 days:
No/Unknown: 0%
Poor: 0%
Moderate: 0%
Good: 3%
Great: 93%
[UNACCOUNTED 4%]

The difference from the first day alone was quite interesting but I stopped testing MIUI after only 4 days. The readings consistently showed time unaccounted for (you can see this in the screenshot for MIUI which is somehow missing 7%, 83+10=93%), which kinda ruins the idea for making these statistics in the first place. I have no idea what caused this to happen, might be an issue with the beta I was using (8.12.13) but can't say for sure.
Furthermore after seeing the numbers I feel like there might be something to the rumor of MIUI misrepresenting the stats. Since BBS was mostly reporting "great reception" which should be 4 (or full) bars if I am correct, but I mostly saw 3 bars on my status bar indicator and rarely 4. Readings under crDroid seem to confirm this and are more consistent with what is going on in the status bar indicator.

crDroid was recommended because of its cell reception (compared to other custom roms), it is based off of Lineage OS and thus hopefully easy to troubleshoot if it indeed has better reception. It had a recent update which specifically pointed out "- improved signal strength stability"

crDroid (build 2018.12.19) after 6 days of testing:
No/Unknown: 0%
Poor: 0%
Moderate: 0%
Good: 80%
Great: 20%

Pixel Experience (build 2018.24.12) after one week of testing:
No/Unknown: 0%
Poor: 0%
Moderate: 0%
Good: 97,5%
Great: 2,5%

SOLUTION(?):

https://github.com/crdroidandroid/a...mmit/a9d9f3c62fb456d8c47c582900011a9b5d4f9a10
This is the reason for stable signal in crDroid.

This was pointed out as possible solution and from what i've seen that would make sense. But I can not confirm if it is the definite solution until I've tested a rom after they implemented the fix and so far I am falling on deaf ears (or at least got no response when bringing it up) with the issue and this fix.

user @PieR confirmed this and provided this link for further insight into the problem: https://forum.xda-developers.com/re...t/dev-fix-signal-issues-fluctuations-t3811950

More details about the topic are emerging and apparently the root of lineage already has something in place for it:

Actually that's not the way to implement the fix. I contacted another developer at Lineage and he told me that the above method isn't the right way. The correct method is like the one implemented here. https://github.com/LineageOS/androi...s/apps/CarrierConfig/res/xml/vendor.xml#L1395

but either the poco f1 lineage fork hasnt yet, or it is not working!?

Edit: More ROMs added with very short testing (10min):
Syberia OS
Nitrogen OS
Lineage OS (build 2019.01.10)
Reloaded CAF

 

[Poopsterbate]

Let me chip in with my stats. Basically when using MIUI it was 100% always just like OP.

 

[Perfectdevil]

Let me chip in with my stats. Basically when using MIUI it was 100% always just like OP.

maybe in miui the app doesn't have full access to signal stats and just report 100%.... even in Berlin or even living under the CELL SIGNAL TOWER u can't have 100% at all times.... I'll understand if MIUI was better 5 to 10% than custom ROM but at 100% all times seems fishy
also custom rom and miui use the same baseband so why would it be any different!!!!?

Sent from my POCOPHONE F1 using Tapatalk

 

[Poopsterbate]

maybe in miui the app doesn't have full access to signal stats and just report 100%.... even in Berlin or even living under the CELL SIGNAL TOWER u can't have 100% at all times.... I'll understand if MIUI was better 5 to 10% than custom ROM but at 100% all times seems fishy
also custom rom and miui use the same baseband so why would it be any different!!!!?

Well i live in china next to alibaba HQ where 4 elevators in my building have their own small devices which gives me full signal(before los). Its not flexing just a fact that i live in a community which values fast internet and connectivity more than anything.

I would think the app would report 0 because as far as i read the app uses the bat information the firmware generates itself. App is just reading that information to give you nice little graphs.

 

[ashishk912]

I agree with this problem. I live in a hostel and for the first two months I used poco I had MIUI. After that I switched to LOS I kept getting signal drops and reduced speeds. My friends who use the same provider are getting better speeds and we literally are in the same room. I switched back to MIUI today. Just came back home, gotta go back in a week. Will update if it's actually LOS causing the network problems

 

[bad1080]

so after writing all of this yesterday and seeing the numbers i came up with a possible explanation: roaming. roaming could be the one thing that explains all of this. maybe the los isnt doing it enough, maybe it isnt doing it at all (which would explain the time with "no signal" too) maybe there are just hickups when switching between carriers?! i dont know... maybe it is just the way miui enforces roaming over using your own carrier?

updated miui stats from today below (and added to the op), results are pretty much the same throughout the night.

 

[javadahut]

I haven't been able to get LTE since I switched from MIUI to LOS. I'm in US and traveling to Europe in a few days. I want to see if there's any difference. It's such an internal debate since WiFi is so prevalent. I love LOS, do I really need LTE? I think the answer is yes. I might be switching back to MIUI soon.

 

[Saswata Chakraborty]

Yeah, I can confirm the network reception is poor in custom ROMs. It's not true that miui is faking network reception. I tested both custom (almost all) and stock ROM at my office, and where I get full signal bars on stock miui, the network fluctuates a lot on custom ROMs (sometimes it goes down to 0 due to which I miss calls as well).

 

[bad1080]

so i noticed something strange going on with the signal stats under miui, i have ~7% that are unaccounted for... not sure if this is just a hickups or how this could've happen in the first place?! i will reset the stats and keep an eye out for this sort of thing going forward.

edit: i went through all my bbs screenshot from los and in all of them the numbers add up to ~100%, so no such errors there in over ten days of monitoring.

 

[Poopsterbate]

so i noticed something strange going on with the signal stats under miui, i have ~7% that are unaccounted for... not sure if this is just a hickups or how this could've happen in the first place?! i will reset the stats and keep an eye out for this sort of thing going forward.

edit: i went through all my bbs screenshot from los and in all of them the numbers add up to ~100%, so no such errors there in over ten days of monitoring.

No data connection maybe? Means mobile data off i guess

 

[fabricio7p]

Up. I got worse signals here with Pixel experience too. Hope message reach the devs.

My signal bar is half all the time

 

[bad1080]

No data connection maybe? Means mobile data off i guess

"no data connection" is seperate under bbs and is usually at 100% for me which makes sense since i am on wifi 99% of the time.

 

[tavocabe]

I haven't been able to get LTE since I switched from MIUI to LOS. I'm in US and traveling to Europe in a few days. I want to see if there's any difference. It's such an internal debate since WiFi is so prevalent. I love LOS, do I really need LTE? I think the answer is yes. I might be switching back to MIUI soon.

Same here, had 4g connectivity using MIUI but couldn't conect once since I flashed a custom rom, my guess is MIUI reports 4g but it's either a lie or it's only 3.5g

 

[bad1080]

Same here, had 4g connectivity using MIUI but couldn't conect once since I flashed a custom rom, my guess is MIUI reports 4g but it's either a lie or it's only 3.5g

should be easy enough to find out, just run a speedtest over on https://www.speedtest.net
edit: (i think you may need to use the app on mobile, not sure though)

 

[bad1080]

after resetting the stats ~24h ago i am already back at ~2% (20min) unaccounted. i dont know what is happening but there is definitely something wrong with miui here...

 

[javadahut]

I went back to MIUI, getting about 7Mbps down

 

[bad1080]

I went back to MIUI, getting about 7Mbps down

how does that compare to the custom rom and which rom did you use?

 

[phonetech101]

Hi guys I live in Australia out in the bush, I stumbled across this thread and couldn't help but share my experiences with custom ROMs. I'm currently running CrDroid coming from Syberia rom. Now Crdroid gives me way better signal than syberia and never understood why. I moved out to the bush before getting a chance to use miui so I'm trying decide whether to flash it or not to see if it will give even better than custom "Crdroid". But love our curious minds and will be following this

 

[bad1080]

Hi guys I live in Australia out in the bush, I stumbled across this thread and couldn't help but share my experiences with custom ROMs. I'm currently running CrDroid coming from Syberia rom. Now Crdroid gives me way better signal than syberia and never understood why. I moved out to the bush before getting a chance to use miui so I'm trying decide whether to flash it or not to see if it will give even better than custom "Crdroid". But love our curious minds and will be following this

are you using this crdroid? i'd like to give it a try since i am running into issues monitoring the cell status on miui. and i understand crdroid is largely based on lineage os, so it should be easy to find out what they've done differently for the signal to be better compared to los (just guessing).

 

[phonetech101]

are you using this crdroid? i'd like to give it a try since i am running into issues monitoring the cell status on miui. and i understand crdroid is largely based on lineage os, so it should be easy to find out what they've done differently for the signal to be better compared to los (just guessing).

We I haven't had a chance to test miui for to long but did flash the beta pie version today and did notice I got 2 bars in the same spot I flashed the phone from crdroid but withing half an hour of setting up miui I got the ****s and went back to crdroid lol sorry I love the custom stuff miui can't offer and I hate there setting menu toggles u me it but each to there own I guess some might love it. Bit yeah crdroid is doing me better than any other from iv tried and I have tried a lot hahaha.