Signal Strength Indicators

Has anyone, especially AT&T users, noticed different behaviors for the signal strength indicator in iOS 7? I'm not talking about the whole dots instead of bars thing, I mean the phone actually reporting stronger signal. On my 4S running iOS 7 I am seeing 4-5 dots in my house. My wife, running 6.x on her 4, shows 1-2 bars. When I entered field test mode our signal strength was almost identical with the two phones right next to each other on a table. Mine was actually slightly weaker (-102 on mine, -97 on hers).

I've found that service at these levels is spotty at best in iOS 6, with lots of dropped calls. I haven't done much testing with iOS 7 since I normally use a micro cell at home, where I did the quick test above. But some quick speed tests do perform similar to how they did prior to iOS 7. So what's the deal here? Is iOS 7 reporting better service just for the hell of it, or have there been changes and Apple is able to do more with less signal and thus is displaying an indicator with stronger signal? I highly doubt it's the latter, but since I haven't had a chance to test this much yet I thought I would throw it out there.