Seeing Kazakhstan with 80% LTE coverage I was close to laugh but then found:
> 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.
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!)
I think people need to interpret the results with some careful thoughts. For Example CSl and 1010 in Hong Kong are different Brands but same network. But they differ in coverage%.
> 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.
Not sure that's the best way though.