Friday, November 7, 2014

Confusion and contradiction: The state of mobile network testing in the UK

In April this year a report in an industry publication suggested Ofcom was planning to purchase ‘over-the-counter’ handsets and use them to execute its own UK-wide walk and drive mobile data testing programme. According to the correspondent contacted by Ofcom, the planned testing would look at “whether UK networks have achieved consistency” - but not go so far as to test for “quality of service”.

In other words, the tests would ascertain where in the British Isles you can get a signal from EE, Vodafone, O2 and 3 but nothing else revealing in relation to the actual network performance (e.g. are you able to look up a web page, send an email or a tweet, upload a photo of your fish and chip dinner to Instagram, etc).

Would the results of such a test benefit UK consumers? Some would say that all testing on behalf of consumers is a good thing – but I am not so sure. Mobile network testing is notoriously difficult to get right, and its outcomes are fiendishly difficult to interpret; if either the testing or the interpreting goes wrong, the whole business can be more than a little misleading.

read full article at Telecoms Tech

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