From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7) Gecko/20040706 Firefox/0.9.1 Description of problem: While connected to a very weak WAP signal from another building, the wireless applet nevertheless indicates signal strength near 100%. WinXP reports the same signal as "very weak" and wavemon reports s/n ratios in the single digits. Disabling the interface leaves the last measured percentage instead of switching to "N/A". What is actually being displayed, anyway? Signal strength as a percentage of what? Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): gnome-applets-2.6.2.1-1 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Install and enable wireless applet 2. Connect to a WAP at long distance and watch the signal strength meter. 3. Toggle the wireless interface between up and down. Actual Results: Signal strength meter indicates "very strong" signal (90-100%). When the link is disabled, a percentage still shows in the signal strength field and "WiFi" still shows in the status box, but is not updated. Expected Results: Signal strength meter should indicate "very weak signal" (not quite sure what's appropriate). Disabling the interface should change the status to indicated that I'm not connected. Additional info: On my home netowork, where I'm within about 30 feet of my WAP, signal strength is in the 70-90% range.
*** Bug 129100 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Okay, this is being figured out upstream, but its not trivial. The link quality reported by the kernel isn't an absolute metric and very few cards actually report enough information to normalize the value. Anyway, lets just track the upstream bug: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=119472