The full form of RSSI is Received Signal Strength Indicator.

RSSI, or “Received Signal Strength Indicator,” is a measurement of how well your device can hear a signal from an access point or router. It’s a value that is useful for determining if you have enough signal to get a good wireless connection.

Note: Because an RSSI value is pulled from the client device’s WiFi card (hence “received” signal strength), it is not the same as transmit power from a router or AP.

dBm and RSSI are different units of measurement that both represent the same thing: signal strength. The difference is that RSSI is a relative index, while dBm is an absolute number representing power levels in mW (milliwatts).

RSSI is a term used to measure the relative quality of a received signal to a client device, but has no absolute value. The IEEE 802.11 standard (a big book of documentation for manufacturing WiFi equipment) specifies that RSSI can be on a scale of 0 to up to 255 and that each chipset manufacturer can define their own “RSSI_Max” value. Cisco, for example, uses a 0-100 scale, while Atheros uses 0-60. It’s all up to the manufacturer (which is why RSSI is a relative index), but you can infer that the higher the RSSI value is, the better the signal is.

Since RSSI varies greatly between chipset manufacturers, MetaGeek software uses a more standardized, absolute measure of signal strength: received signal power, which is measured in decibels, or dBm on a logarithmic scale. There’s a lot of math we could get into, but basically, the closer to 0 dBm, the better the signal is.

To help leverage your signal strength measurement most effectively so you can make channel planning decisions, inSSIDer displays signal strength in two ways.

Acceptable Signal Strengths