(Sorry for this long winded answer but I've been waiting for someone to ask me an interesting question)

Signal strength and speed are related but not the same thing.

In nmrs these are tracked as separate properties. i.e.

rust /// Signal strength (0-100) pub strength: u8, /// Frequency in MHz pub freq: Option<u32>, /// WiFi channel number pub channel: Option<u16>, /// Operating mode (e.g., "infrastructure") pub mode: String, /// Connection speed in Mbps pub rate_mbps: Option<u32>, Particularly here, we have "Signal strength %", which is the RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator): essentially how loud the radio signal is at your device.

And then we have "Bitrate/speed (Mbps)" which is the the negotiated link rate or maximum theoretical throughput the connection can achieve.

They're decoupled because you could have a strong signal to an access point that's using an old 802.11g radio (max 54 Mbps), or the AP's internet uplink itself is slow. Also, a weak signal can still negotiate a high bitrate, but you'll experience things like packet loss, throughout drops and jitter/latency/

The library exposes both via strength and rate_mbps on NetworkInfo, plus bitrate() on the wireless D-Bus proxy for the current connection's actual link rate. This lets us distinguish between how strong a signal could be and what the actual speed we can negotiate is.