JamesCRR
Joined 14 years ago
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Android Guy and Data Tinkerer at OpenSignal
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Comment · 11 years ago
Hi this is James from OpenSignal.
By "proprietary" we basically mean "here's a cool new metric (ps we invented it)" not "here's a cool new metric (ps we're not gonna tell you how it works)". That said the link to the methodology is a little buried, but you can find the details here: http://opensignal.com/methodology/time_coverage/
One thing to note is that it's possible that if you only launched LTE in urban areas and the LET users stay within those urban areas, then the time-coverage can be great, even if if the geographic coverage is poor and a low percentage of the population has access to LTE overall. Nonetheless, it is a measurement of the experience that those users that have LTE are getting.
Given this, we do have to be wary about markets where LTE is not mature yet.
Good point re. unlimited vs limited data plans and how the latter can make it easier for an operator to provide good throughput (but overall you might get less volume). This is illustrative of a bigger challenge - there's no single metric that can tell you: "this is the best operator in the world". We're never going to claim that. But our crowdsourced data can offer a global, impartial view that I think has been missing.
Comment · 11 years ago
(This is James from OpenSignal)
I agree time coverage needs to be carefully interpreted - particularly when an deployment is focussed just in a city, a high time coverage percentage shouldn't be taken as meaning there is a strong nationwide deployment. But it does show the experience of the users who do have LTE.
For markets that have had LTE for longer, and with high LTE penetration (i.e. large percentage of subscribers using LTE), time coverage does show how effective the rollout as been.
Two more notes on why we've chosen to do this:
- Firstly geographical coverage is a little shaky - there are questions over how to factor in indoors/outdoors/under a bridge, cell breathing and other temporal fluctuations should be taken into account. The time coverage we use is unambiguous: we look at the proportion of time users have access to the LTE metric.
- Secondly: our crowdsourced methodology is focussed on measurement, not modelling. There are often very sparsely readings where we simply don't have LTE readings, we can't conclude unequivocally that there is no LTE there, or just no users. There are some ways we can get round this we can look into on (extrapolating from our cell maps), but for the moment we're much more confident in the time coverage (though caveats are required!)