Bars increasing in height, as displayed on a mobile phone to indicate the strength of a cellular or wireless network signal. More bars signify better reception.

Typically depicted as a white series of bars on a blue square background, though Google and Samsung’s backgrounds are orange and Facebook’s is green. The number of bars shown varies slightly by platform, though all platforms depict full signal strength.

Many previous designs from several platforms, including Google, Samsung, Microsoft, and Facebook, also included an antenna symbol placed beside the bars.

This emoji predates the inclusion of emojis within Unicode. It was first added to early Japanese emoji keyboards by au by KDDI in 2003.

Antenna Bars was approved as part of Unicode 6.0 in 2010 under the name "Antenna with Bars" and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.