@koimr1 wrote:
Is this on the exact same phone? If not then you can't reliably compare - some phone models are better/worse at signal strength as well as there's no standard for what a "bar" should be.
Somewhat true. Signal bars are very much like the fuel gauge in your car, there is no real technical standard which defines exact "bar" thresholds.
But manufacturers (like Apple, Samsung, etc) tend to use the same "standard" signal metrics across all of their devices. ARM-based Android devices tend to scale signal metrics to whatever values are provided in the technical literature for their onboard SoC/chipset parts, meaning that different phones by different manufacturers which happen to use the same radio/modem/processing hardware and the same Android OS version will tend to define the same thresholds for each signal bar.
Different software/apps which report signal strength will each define their own thresholds and parameters. Regardless whether they're OEM software built into the device or they're user-installed third-party apps.
Smartphones can be configured to report signal strength in raw dBm or calculated ASU instead of or alongside user-friendly signal bars. (dBm and ASU are technically meaningful and accurate terms ... but they're also slightly complex and very non-intuitive terms.)
https://powerfulsignal.com/cell-signal-strength/
Many apps exist which promise to somehow improve, increase, boost, or amplify signal strength. And some of these are popular, they have avid followings of happy people who swear the app has made their once-worthless phone magically work perfectly. But I've never bothered with any of these sorts of apps - partly because my PM (Telus) signal has generally been quite adequate, and partly because I understand that no amount of software can increase capabilities (or remove limits) built into hardware.
Battery strength can have profound impact on apparent signal strength. This can be misleading or confusing with batteries which have degraded from age, misuse, high duty cycle, or accumulated charge/discharge cycles ... it can even be misleading or confusing with a brand new factory fresh battery which is exposed to small variations in temperature ... because the phone software will calibrate and scale everything else at "100%" when the battery reports "full" charge, even if eroded or underspec battery chemistry can't actually reach nominally rated "100%" anymore.
PM uses Telus network and Telus hardware. So PM's signal strengths, bandwidths, QoS, reliability, and performance should never be any worse (or any better) than Telus or Koodo, the phone plan and prices and billing is a different company (er, Telus subsidiary/brand) but the phone service itself is identical. The only explanation I can offer for apparently inferior PM signal strength - and it's sheer speculation, and I think it's highly unlikely - is that perhaps your area is serviced by Bell base stations and for some unknown reason Bell's systems handle PM traffic at a lower-priority than they handle Telus traffic during peak-demand conditions.
