
The State of LTE in September 2015 - sinak
http://opensignal.com/reports/2015/09/state-of-lte-q3-2015/
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archmikhail
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.

[http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/26/does-
high...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2012/08/26/does-high-speed-
broadband-increase-economic-growth/)

~~~
rdtsc
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.

~~~
snaily
> 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.

~~~
rdtsc
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.

~~~
Synaesthesia
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.

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Scoundreller
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?

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JamesCRR
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/](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.

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zw123456
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.

~~~
indeed30
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.

~~~
zw123456
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.

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the_mitsuhiko
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.

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tucif
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.

~~~
indeed30
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.

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bumbledraven
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.

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msh
When I do a speed test using open signal the data speed is most of the time
significantly slower than using speedtest.net.

So I am not sure how accurate this is.

~~~
kiksy
Depends on where the server you're running the test on is. Speedtest.net hunts
out the fastest one, maybe Opensignal has less servers/slower servers?

~~~
msh
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.

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mamon
Data for Poland is outdated: PlusGSM network already have 80% coverage, and
Play has 70%

