Comment 9 for bug 611336

Having tested this at home, I can see that much of my last comment is incorrect (sorry about that). The wireless strength icon is in fact a supplement to the status icon, so the signal strength icons should certainly stay as they are.

As an aside: In fact there are issues with the netstatus applet's intention for these icons: it seems it should be rotated for vertical panels, which is useful for thin signal icons (such is in the gnome theme), but not square ones like those used in the main Ubuntu themes. This doesn't appear to work at the moment (no signal is shown on a vertical panel I created). There is also an issue with having no dedicated 'zero signal' icon for the applet, and the disparity between 'link quality'/'signal strength' calculations for network manager and netstatus applet. All in all, it's pretty messy!

I also notice that the mono icon themes use up and down arrows for the link status (possibly the most obvious choice). While this bug also affects those themes, fully fading this idle icon should be acceptable because the sense is that the data stream is inactive, rather than the device/connection. However, the disconnected icon in those themes uses the wireless pictograph, which doesn't make sense for wired network users, and in Humanity it's the wired pictograph that is used, which isn't ideal for predominantly wireless users (though at least the idiom of 'being unplugged' carries some weight). The link status arrows could be altered to create a disconnected icon by adding a cross for example, but the set of icons I've proposed (excluding those for wireless signal strength) bypasses both the disconnected problem, and the idle problem.