The economic benefit of vastly improving data speeds across the country far out weighs the costs of improving the network. As the tech capital of the world, the US should not be #10 in LTE coverage.
It is a large country and has existing infrastructure. It is hard to compare US to say a West European country and look at internet speeds or LTE coverage. US is just much larger so looking at geographical coverage it doesn't look good at all.
The existing infrastructure part is companies will refuse to update their system for as long as the existing one kinda works. Sometimes with only 1 or 2 companies covering a region. If both stay at 3G, the customer basically doesn't have a choice. So no need to upgrade.
If it was an African country, without an existing network, they might choose to jump to the latest technology (like some skipped installing wired phones and just went to cell phones in the past). In the chart Khazakstan and Uruguay is perhaps in that category.
In the speed category Romania kills it with 30Mbps. That's pretty cool for being a relatively poor European country.
> It is a large country and has existing infrastructure.
The latter part is the real elephant in the room here - the former reason is by now a cliché putdown when it comes to infrastructure investment in the US. Kazahkstan and Uruguay are not small, even less dense than the US, and poorer - yet have better LTE coverage.
But they fall in the other category -- probably didn't have an existing infrastructure already. So no backward compatibility worries, no need to throw away an existing investment if it already makes money.
Same with South Africa. We're a relatively poor country, very large and sparsely populated, but doing quite well on the LTE scale, although we are known as cellphone mad over here.
Yeah, it's really shocking to see how US carriers compare to the rest of the world (choose US in the Countries dropdown under the chart). I knew our wired internet speeds were lagging behind, but didn't realize LTE was that far behind as well.
AT&T and Verizon pretty much dominate and own the industry. Why improve when you can collude? Its not like anyone can actually compete, they own the spectrum.
Sprint and T-Mobile have significantly worse networks and access to spectrum.
Does not help that AT&T and Verizon are also huge stakeholders in the wired telecom oligopoly. They are overflowing in cash to crush competition.
With Google jumping into the wired internet business with Google Fiber, I'm surprised they haven't bought a controlling interest in T-Mobile yet (as Deutsche Telekom is always trying to unload T-Mobile on someone).
I don't understand why they would want to. Cell phone carriers aren't high profit business and has a ton of employees. Verizon has 180k employees and has net income of I see around 5billion profit on around 100 billion in income last year. Verizon FiOS pretty much got last Verizon CEO fired.
Google margins are way higher and Verizon employees more call center reps then all of Google in total.
From my understanding Google fiber is basically cheap dark fiber they got with some great regulatory concessions.
My view of it is Google spends enough just to prompt others to take actions (see their involvement in specturm bidding). Though my post might come off as judgemental, I'm not judging Google - that's merely good business for them to do. Wireless companies themselves are hardly examples of efficiency.
I don't see how them having controlling stake in TMobile helps them on that goal. I don't see either how wireless carriers have a real way to limit Googls mobile ad. I think Android alone accomplishes that goal, and until and unless phone carriers role out their own os alternatives that people don't hate, they'll be forced to offer Android.
Their involvement with spectrum bidding got them open access rights for only a few million.
The numbers are all meaningless to everyone but opensignal since they're proprietary.
"The proportion of time users have an LTE signal, or LTE 'Time Coverage', is our proprietary metric for looking at coverage holistically, instead of just as a measurement of geographical reach. "
The Canadian numbers are problematic for a few reasons:
1) LTE mainly means you can run through your (typically <= 1gb/month) "bucket" in about 5 minutes, with overage charges starting from the first byte over. So what's the point of LTE is artificially constrained?
Contrast this with France where providers give you a bigger LTE bandwidth cap because it's more spectrally efficient.
2) There are several non-overlapping LTE providers. If one provider has LTE in an area but yours does not, you cannot roam to the other. So what's the point of measuring if a user could get an LTE signal?
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.
The Canadian numbers are problematic for a few reasons: 1) LTE mainly means you can run through your (typically <= 1gb/month) "bucket" in about 5 minutes, with overage charges starting from the first byte over. So what's the point of LTE is artificially constrained?
LTE has wayyyyyy better reliability, lower latency and jitter than 3G. Interactive browsing on LTE is a night-and-day better experience compared to 3G. My dad uses his phone to collect payments with Square and on 3G it can sometimes take over 5 minutes for a transaction to go through; on LTE it rarely takes more than a second.
The main reason the numbers are really meaningless is because if you want to test the speeds of just the LTE part it is impossible unless you have access to the carrier's test servers ahead of their hand off to the internet. Otherwise you are just testing the speed of the internet which we all understand varies under a number of factors.
It is good that they have a way of measuring coverage that is not strictly geographically based but since it is proprietary it is hard to actually know what it means.
Lte speeds are faster than Wifi due to the backhaul obviously, typically wireless carriers buy higher BW backhaul that wifi providers since wifi is free so they tend to skimp on that, in theory wifi can do about the same speeds as Lte from the air interface capability by itself.
I work for OpenSignal, and produced the data used in this report, so I'd like give some assurances around the coverage aspect. The principle is to calculate the percentage of time that each user was connected to LTE over the period in question, and then average over such users to arrive at an average figure per network. Naturally I'm understating some complexities around minor issues (mainly around cleaning and combining users' measurements), but it isn't like we've gone completely off-road and developed a black-box procedure here - it's pretty much what you would expect.
On the first point, yes, you're completely right that we are measuring the whole package, however we'd argue that this is what users really care about.
Thanks for responding. It sounds like a pretty reliable approach, but it almost sounds more like availability than coverage in the traditional sense that we think about it (geographic, which has some drawbacks as well).
And I agree, the end to end is where the rubber meets the road but I think with the state of LTE, particularly where Advanced features like CA come in to play, we are at times being throttled by the internet more than by the air interface. Although, we are a long way from having that type of tput across the air interface everywhere, but it seems like LTE has the potential to start outstripping what the current internet can do.
At least here (Austria) the LTE rollout was faster and more useful for customers than the original 3G rollout. It sounds like companies actually are intetested in it for other reasons than just having nicer looking numbers.
Drei/Three here upgraded every single base station throught the country so that you know have LTE in the mountains and rural areas even, though some of the backhaul is not yet fiber in those areas.
It's bizarre now that the mobile networks are faster than what comes out of the cable.
//edit: i doubt the opensignal numbers. They seem very ... different than real live. Wonder how they measure.
I feel the coverage percentages are difficult to visualize fairly, given that they don't take into account the size of each country.
50% coverage in a big country is not really less than 80% in a much smaller one. It would be interesting to have a way to visualize the network coverage taking into account that.
Since we're collecting data from the actual user location, we really do capture the true experience of coverage - if a busy, popular, location has good coverage that will be reflected already in the data. This means that a large country could do extremely well, provided it covered the important urban locations. It obviously still takes more effort on the part of the operators to provide this coverage in a large country, but we're less affected by this problem than more traditional geographic coverage approaches.
Although, that said, I think it could still be interesting and it's definitely feedback we'll take on board for next time. I'd say that the gap between 50% and 80% time on LTE is actually pretty important to the user.
Global LTE speed is a super unfair comparison. The US has a lot of rural areas where it's not economically efficient for wireless operators to install high speed LTE transceivers.
But that makes their test results invalid. They can't claim a certain average speed if that speed is way lower than what the network deliver in the real world.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/26/does-high...