Category: Uncategorized

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Key takeouts from Critical Communications World 2023 Event

Netradar participated at Critical Communications World 2023 event which was first time ever arranged in Finland. Our solutions were displayed at Finnish pavilion comprising of Finnish authorities and the public safety operator Erillisverkot.


Migration from legacy 2G voice-based systems to 5G broadband leveraging state of the art voice, video and data services was widely discussed at various conference presentations. Some countries have already launched their broadband services, while others are busy with their deployment projects or considering their alternatives (latter being minority).

Although markets do differ, there are lot of commonalities:

  • Critical communication operators typically have their own core to control security and service development aspects

  • In most of the cases radio access network comes from one or many public operators, however these networks have typically been extended in their coverage, capacity and augmented with suitable network hardening

  • Customer first – came up as a theme in many of the conference presentations – after all, how well the connectivity product works in the hands of users matters the most

Regardless of the way the connectivity is provided, it must fulfill the needs of the end users in their daily tasks. These end users are the most demanding ones as bad or lost connectivity can lead to serious national problems and even loss of life in the worst case. Collecting radio data only is not enough, you need to have a lot of network level KPIs (from customer points of view), because having a good signal does not correlate with high speeds.

Netradar has developed an end-to-end solution for Erillisverkot Group which automatically collects network performance data from geolocated users, and it provides radio network engineers with specific locations where network coverage or capacity is a problem. This is done up to 10,000 times more efficiently and faster than legacy solutions. Furthermore, Erillisverkot customers can raise network improvement tickets directly from the Virve-tutka app.

Please note our next webinar on June 15th entitled Netradar versus legacy crowdsourcing solutions.

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Insights from MWC 2023 – Barcelona, Spain

We had the privilege to have a stand at the Mobile World Congress in 2023. Compared to 2022 we were able to multiply the number of customer meetings. Luckily enough we had three representatives on the stand to be able to handle sometimes multiple simultaneous meetings.

The most visible themes at the operator stands were clearly AR, VR, Metaverse and sustainability. For instance Vodafone stand was all green with walls growing plants and the themes they were talking about were very much related to sustainability and digital green. KT Telecom had a VR/AR enriched helicopter ride on their stand that was attracting big crowds. Unfortunately I didn’t have time this year to listen to operator presentations due to high amount of traffic at our stand.

I would say that Nokia stole the show by launching their new logo and brand strategy. Nokia stand was also positioned so that it could not be missed and it was glowing in the end of the corridor with a lucrative entrance.

It was very clear during the congress that operators are truly seeking ways to improve their network quality and thus reduce churn by making their customers more satisfied. We at Netradar are happy to provide a solution to mobile operators that reveal areas in the network that need improvement. Our solution is measuring network quality and performance directly from the mobile devices of operators’ customers revealing areas where operators need to invest to excel in mobile network performance. Netradar can be used for instance to find out high latency areas, areas without any cellular coverage and to replace drive testing.

Please note our next webinar on April 18th entitled Netradar versus legacy crowdsourcing solutions.

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Creanord and Netradar announce strategic partnership for 5G end-to-end performance monitoring

HELSINKI/ESPOO, FINLAND, February 20, 2023

Creanord and Netradar announced a strategic partnership today that aims at building an end-to-end solution for measuring and managing network performance.

 

Low latency and stable jitter are critically important for many web apps, XR/VR, gaming, metaverse, cars, VoIP, and videoconferencing. Often, latency is much more important than a very high bit rate. Latency is as good as the weakest link and node in the telecom operator network.

 

Together, Creanord and Netradar provide telecom operators a full end-to-end picture of their network performance. Netradar measures latency from the mobile device to the network or cloud and Creanord measures the performance of the transport and core networks. Operators can perform a segmented analysis of network performance to determine whether the issues are in the radio access network, backhaul transport or core for fast root-cause detection and resolving.

 

“Our joint solution improves troubleshooting end-to-end issues. Netradar helps telecom operators to identify radio coverage areas with poor user experience and to verify radio interface performance. Creanord in turn steps in to troubleshoot backhaul and core network when an issue is first isolated to those domains,” said Tomi Paatsila, CEO of Netradar.

 

“Creanord solution continuously tracks network performance in backhaul and core and identifies sites and hops with degraded performance. Our co-operation with Netradar extends this performance visibility to cover also the radio part, and thus provides a full end-to-end view for Mobile Network Operators to detect and fix performance degradations before they are visible to end users,” states Jorma Hämäläinen, CEO of Creanord.

 

Creanord and Netradar participate in the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona February 27 – March 2, 2023.

Tomi Paatsila

CEO & Co-Founder
Netradar

Claus Still

CTO
Creanord

This was the first local GSMA event attended by Netradar and based on my experience we will be attending more of those in the future. This built up the confidence that Mobile World Congress in Barcelona during February 27 – March 2, 2023, will have the magnitude similar or even greater than pre-COVID.  

You are welcome to visit our stand in MWC Barcelona

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Netradar releases AI-powered network troubleshooting solution

Netradar today, 20 February 2023, announced the release of AI-powered network troubleshooting solution.

 

The telecom market is very competitive and customer expectations continue to rise with 5G marketing and new types of apps.

 

Understanding customer experience better than the competition is critical for telecom operators long-term success. While important for marketing, high-level benchmarking data is not enough. This is where Netradar AI-powered network troubleshooting solution can help.

Key features of the Netradar solution are:

  • True customer experience – We do not perform old-fashioned speed tests but analyze the network performance end users really experience all day long.
  • Huge amount of data – Data collection is based on end users’ own traffic, not periodic speed tests, yielding typically 1000x more data than any other vendor.
  • Private data collection – Data is stored securely in a private cloud or in our customers’ own data centers.
  • Automation – New automation features help to highlight network issues clearly, shortening the time to resolution
  • Latency and capacity analysis – In-depth latency analysis coupled with user data traffic reveals network capacity problems.
  • Indoor Performance – Netradar delivers performance data mapped to indoor zones depending on where the usage takes place.

Tomi Paatsila

CEO & Co-Founder

This was the first local GSMA event attended by Netradar and based on my experience we will be attending more of those in the future. This built up the confidence that Mobile World Congress in Barcelona during February 27 – March 2, 2023, will have the magnitude similar or even greater than pre-COVID.  

You are welcome to visit our stand in MWC Barcelona

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Insights from Mobile 360 Latin America

I had the privilege to participate at the local GSMA series event in México City called Mobile 360 Latin America. This event was also called CLTD 2022 Congreso Latinoamericano de Transformación Digital.

Event venue was Hilton Reforma and it was organized in an extremely professional manner. Great service, presentations started on due time and food and other catering tasted delicious.

 

I was delighted to see how many participants there were present. We had three days full of interesting presentations ranging from Cybersecurity to Industry 4.0 and from 5G to Metaverse.

There were many panel discussions with participants from mobile operators such as América Móvil, Telcel, Claro, Telecom Argentina and from vendors such as Nokia.

It is predicted that there will be 90 million 5G connections in Latin America by 2025. As we had the chance to discuss with many participants together with our LAT Sales Representative during the networking breaks it was great to notice how much interest our Netradar wireless networks analytics solution was creating among the people we talked with.

 We showed to our potential clients Netradar visual Dashboard showing AI-powered troubleshooting features based on network top speed, coverage, capacity, and latency. It seemed that many of the participants were in charge of network performance and quality which was perfect for our needs. We were also able to organize excellent off-site meetings with leading mobile operators.

This was the first local GSMA event attended by Netradar and based on my experience we will be attending more of those in the future. This built up the confidence that Mobile World Congress in Barcelona during February 27 – March 2, 2023, will have the magnitude similar or even greater than pre-COVID.  

You are welcome to visit our stand in MWC Barcelona

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Use Cases from Our Customers

Netradar is an extremely versatile platform and offers data and insights to solve numerous problems and do proactive network enhancements. In this post I open some of the use cases our customers are solving with the help of the Netradar mobile analytics solution.

The cases discussed in this post include:


Replacing legacy drive and walk testing


Indoor coverage


Overall network coverage and capacity


Cell performance and faults


Latencies

Replace Drive Testing and legacy crowdsourcing

Conducting drive and walk testing has been the common way to measure mobile networks since the 90’s. These still seem to have their place, but more and more mobile operators are looking at solutions that would offer continuous monitoring of their service and wider coverage both in terms of geography and time – after all, a drive or walk test only analyses a limited path at a specific time.

Many mobile operators have also been somewhat disappointed with legacy crowd-sourced data because it does not help in developing the radio access network (RAN). The RAN is the most expensive part of the network and doing changes needs statistically valid amount of data and detailed KPIs. Legacy solutions based on speed tests can never offer enough data to fulfil the criteria. If one would like to solve the lack of data with very active testing of speeds using synthetic loads, the problem turns into network load and energy. A single speed test can create anything from a few MBs to a GB of data transfer into the mobile network and if one runs many tests per day, the combined load is quickly measured in terabytes or even petabytes.

Netradar’s unique hybrid measurement technology only consumes around 3MB per device per month. With this little data, the amount equivalent to loading a single web page, we provide a continuous 24/7 analysis of the network quality. And since Netradar does not use speed test servers, the deployment of the solution is extremely lightweight and easy. All the system components can be virtualized and run on an existing cloud platform offering easy scalability and cost-efficiency.

In summary, Netradar has very extensive features and our customers use our system in numerous ways. The beauty is that with a single solution, our customers can solve a number of daily issues and get data for enhancing their network. When Netradar is deployed with our customer, it also collects data from other mobile providers in the same market, and automatically generates the same analysis regardless of the network provider. This makes it possible to compare one’s mobile service to others and go beyond the competition.

As a final note, a small secret, we are working on real-time delivery of network analytics data. Already now our customers can configure how quickly data appears in their database, e.g., a few times per day or once per hour. In the near future, we get data of critical network issues in a matter of minutes or even down to milliseconds, providing a truly real-time network monitoring solution along all the already described features. But more of that in a future blog post.

Indoor Coverage

Wireless signals propagate well in open space but when there are various kinds of obstructions on their path, the result can be anything between a perfect connection and fully missing service. Cellular networks are initially deployed using outdoor towers and over time problematic indoor locations receive their own base stations.

Indoor coverage is typically measured by going directly into suspected building and measuring manually radio parameters and speeds. This is naturally rather unsophisticated as it requires a lot of manual work. Legacy crowd-sourced data does have a location (latitude, longitude) with some accuracy but fails to really identify if a measurement was done indoors or outdoors.

Netradar includes a novel methodology to tell, in addition to the GPS coordinates, if some measured KPIs were collected indoors or outdoors. Moreover, we can tell how deep indoors certain measurement was done, or was the user e.g., technically indoors but next to windows and had a good visibility to the outside world. This helps tremendously in automating the measurements of indoor coverage without going on site.

Overall Network Coverage and Capacity

Cellular networks are designed using planning tools. These need the geography and buildings as input and build models how a base station at a given location and height could perform. The plan that comes out is a good approximation but only a real deployment tells how the mobile subscribers experience the service, indoors and outdoors.

Netradar’s unique technology gathers a huge amount of data with even a small deployment across a mobile provider’s customer base e.g. 10% of users having the Netradar solution. The data collected builds up very quickly and just in a matter of days one can see the true coverage and capacity of the network, and over the following weeks the picture becomes even more clear and exact. Network evolution is analyzed as the service changes and new base stations and radio technologies (like 5G) are deployed. We show how subscribers receive 2G, 3G, 4G and 5G NSA/SA signals and what speeds they are getting at specific locations. We also analyze load balancing and show how distinct locations are served with a mix of cells and frequencies. Moreover, an interesting metric is also the availability of 4G: 4G is still the dominant radio technology but even that is not available in all places, so knowing where there is a lot of data usage but people only getting 3G helps in enhancing the user experience.

A critical but hidden network problem is total lack of coverage. If people try to use data and there is no signal whatsoever, the mobile operator will not know this. Customers might complain but cannot tell where they were at that time. These black spots are not seen in any network statistics either.

Netradar has developed a unique technology to catch moments and locations where the user tried to use data services but could not get any connectivity from his provider. This analysis shows clear locations where no service was available and is therefore extremely critical for today’s mobile users.

Cell performance and faults

All modern cellular technology vendors, such as Ericsson and Nokia, offer a huge amount of data about a base station site and its performance. Our customers tell us often that these metrics they get have two major problems. First, the metrics give averages of a cell’s performance, load and radio values. These values are often rather homogeneous and do not reveal potential issues. This problem takes us to the second issue with overall cell metrics: Cell internal problems. A cell (sector) can serve very complex locations and have planned coverage from a hundred meter to kilometers. Overall KPIs cannot reveal how distinct locations within that sector receive the signal and bit rate.

Netradar shows the real effective coverage and capacity of a cell, and any issues in service even at a 1 m accuracy. This makes it possible to analyze cells and tie their true performance to geographic locations. Our cell performance analysis reveals issues e.g. in cell interference, tower height, direction of antennas and tilt of antennas.

Netradar cannot know what a cellular provider’s initial plan was which came from a planning tool. Thus, our analytics needs to be combined with the data coming from the planning tool to see what the plan was and what the real result is in the field. This comparison can be even automated if the planning tool can export the direction of each cell sector and their planned range. We can also automate finding locations with cross-feed issues minimizing the need to visit sites to check if cables are properly connected.

Moreover, as radio engineers do changes at cell sites, and surely try their best to optimize the service and do proactive network enhancements, you never know what the end results are. With Netradar our customers can analyze the performance before and after and see the effect of a change in a cell site.

Latencies

With new 5G network, latency has become a critical topic. The industry has advocated 1 ms latency but this should be seen as the potential for a service that is run inside the base station itself. All network links in between the user and the service increase this latency, and so does the cloud platform. If subscribers are not getting the performance they expect and the user experience suffers, where is the problem? What is the latency of the radio network itself, the core network, and the peering networks where data might be residing?

We see increasing awareness in our customers on the meaning and impact of the real latency. Our analysis shows that a loaded network can create hundreds of milliseconds of latency in 4G, and we have seen latencies going up to 1-2 seconds in 5G.  We also hear that the vendor of a base station hardware and the configuration used have a significant impact on the latency. As our customers know their network and the vendors, exact hardware, and configuration of each base station, we can help them in optimizing each base station to provide the best possible latency.

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Why you should stop hunting for “Best Telecom Operators Trophies?”

Do you genuinely want to improve the services you provide to your customers and not just winning telecom trophy hunting competitions arranged by telecom benchmarking and legacy crowdsourcing companies?

 

Telecom market is very competitive and customer expectations continue to rise with 5G marketing offers and new apps. Understanding customer experience better than your competitors is critical for your long-term success. While important for marketing, high-level benchmarking data is not enough to surpass competition. 

 

Do you lack statistically significant amount of network performance data collected from end users to make timely and impactful network investment and optimization decisions? Netradar does not perform old-fashioned speed tests. Instead, we analyze the network performance end users experience all day long. We help you to collect 1,000-10,000 times more data than any other solution provider. This enables industry leading accuracy and depth of the analytics, 10,000 times faster access to get the analytics, calculated in hours or a few days at most, instead of months or years with legacy solutions. Furthermore, this data is actionable enabling telecom operators to genuinely improve the services they provide to their customers.

 

Our promise to telecom operators is straight-forward, the data you collect with Netradar is fully owned and controlled by you. With the insights derived from the Netradar solution leveraging its AI 2.0 capabilities, you can build a true competitive advantage and as a byproduct win those trophy hunting competitions, should you wish to.

Netradar solution is in use by leading tier-1 telecom operator groups like T-Mobile US, a leading telecom operator group in Asia Pacific and operators of governmental critical communications networks like the State Security Networks of Finland (Erillisverkot).

If you want to hear more, you could participate in our upcoming webinar on October 20, 2022 – “Netradar solution for private 5G networks. Case study the State Security Networks of Finland”.

Recently Netradar passed the challenging selection process for coveted Young Innovative Company (NIY), a program facilitated by Business Finland. Selected companies are startups with a high business potential that have been in operation for less than five years and have already won significant business internationally. The program funding enables the company to invest in the growth of international business and, in addition, strengthen the team, develop its business model and growth strategy, as well as targeting new markets.

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Netradar AI 2.0

Netradar enables our customers to collect huge amounts of detailed information about their networks and how their own end users experience the wireless service. This has proven to be extremely valuable for our customers.

 

Some of our customers use the raw data performing their own analysis on it and merging the raw data potentially with other data sources. Others use our visual dashboard to see various performance metrics and maps about their network comparing that to other providers. And some do both.

 

The fundamental question with a huge amount of detailed data is the information it gives to us. Data is useless unless it reveals some critical insights and helps in the daily operations of a company.

 

For a mobile network provider, the basic question is, how is my service performing in the eyes of the subscribers? Are they getting (even close to) what they pay for? Locations with great performance are important to know but even more important are places and situations where the subscribers are having quality issues. The Netradar data crunching engine has now been upgraded with numerous AI-powered features and clearly point out locations with suboptimal performance, based on different metrics.

 

I’ll go over some of the new features that will be deployed during Q3/2022. Our capabilities increase again later this year as we continuously develop new cool ideas.

Missing 4G and 5G

Today 4G/LTE is the dominant mobile technology and will be for many years to come. Yet, 5G is being deployed and eventually will take over. Coverage is built with simulation tools that try to consider signal propagation, geography, and buildings. The fundamental question is, are the mobile subscribers being really served by 4G/5G or are they dropping to 3G or even 2G? How many people are affected and how badly? How well do the planning tools map the real world? The Netradar Coverage AI shows where problems occur, how many people are affected and helps in configuring the network to fill the gaps. Some of these are intentional, a side effect of incrementally deploying a new technology, while others are unintentional and not seen from base station metrics alone.

Low signal quality

While e.g., 4G signal can be available in an area the question is how good is it or how strong? Having a signal available is a prerequisite to offering a wireless service but then the signal characteristics dictate the best possible performance that could be achieved in each location. The Netradar Signal AI highlights these places and prioritizes the locations based on the number of affected subscribers. The dashboard distinguishes between RSRP, RSRQ and RSSNR thus enabling the study of signal power, quality and interference.

Low Top Download Speed

Network top download speed seems to be the most familiar metric to many wireless professionals. It does have its place, among other KPIs. Netradar Speed AI can analyze both top speeds and capacities. We can show specific locations where the top speeds remain low even on a 4G or 5G network and therefore negatively impact the subscribers and their apps.

Low Capacity

While top speed is a familiar concept in the end it does not tell the real capacity that is available to the subscribers. A location might give, at times, a very high-top speed but over the course of a day or week, this location might have serious capacity issues where the subscribers are left with very low speeds. This in turn affects the experience that subscribers get from their wireless provider. The Netradar Capacity AI uses our patented hybrid measurement technology to analyze the speeds subscribers are getting and informs when speeds go below acceptable levels. We can show the locations with the highest impact to subscribers and thereby then best potential to increase user satisfaction.

High latency

Current 4G networks can already offer low latencies but in 5G latency is increasingly important. Mobile networks are built gradually, having older and newer hardware, different types of connectivity from the base stations to fixed networks with varying signal propagation environments and even capacity constraints. All these will affect the real latency as experienced by the end users. The Netradar Latency AI pinpoints these locations sorting them based on impact to subscribers. With different thresholds, we can paint a very detailed picture of the latency that the subscribers are experiencing in the best and worst cases. This helps tremendously when developing new kind of services that require low latency.

Indoor vs Outdoor

A further unique feature of Netradar solution is our ability to distinguish between outdoor and indoor usage. We can tell if some issue is happening outdoors or if it is tied to indoor coverage. E.g., a shopping mall or office building might have great coverage and performance outdoors but when people enter the building their service drops to an unacceptable level. Indoor base stations might cover the building, but mobile devices might also simply hang on the macro base station and have a low service quality. All the above individual AI features are implemented for both indoor and outdoor use cases. Thus, we can show e.g., bad capacity in outdoor areas or missing 4G in some buildings.

 

Final words

Our AI is focusing on the different KPIs and how many people are affected by the poor performance of the wireless network. This allows focusing the work first on locations with the highest impact to subscribers. Yet some places might not have a great number of subscribers but are otherwise important based on non-technical factors. These locations can be analyzed with our performance and coverage tools with ease.

Further down the path we have interesting features coming up e.g., fully missing coverage of any radio technology (aka. black holes) or low uplink speeds and capacity. We also have capabilities to identify explicit interference to satellite signals, which results in bad location accuracy or even fully missing location-based services. Stay tuned!

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The Sustainable Way to Measure Network Quality

Global warming has been taken extremely seriously around the world and various countries and industry sectors are working to lower their impact on our environment. The ICT sector brings constantly new services and solutions that help other sectors to realize their goals on resource efficiency and sustainability.

Yet, we must also look at how the ICT sector itself, through these various services, uses resources and affects our goals towards a sustainable society. ICT-based services need hardware to process and deliver the data and software to create the services. The hardware uses electricity, and manufacturing of equipment uses materials and energy; and naturally shipping hardware around the world is not free either.

In this article, we discuss the sustainability of the Netradar solution, and why there is no better solution in terms of sustainability.

No Hardware

Netradar is purely a software-based solution and based on three logical components. First, we need an agent measuring the network quality. We currently focus on Android phones and offer an SDK or a separate app to our customers. We can support other end points too when the need arises.

Secondly, our methodology is based on a deep understanding of latency and its behavior and therefore we need latency measurement servers. Our servers are virtual and highly optimized. They can and should be deployed in virtual environments making use of existing data center platforms. There is no real benefit of deploying our latency measurements on barebone servers.

Thirdly, as in data collection and processing systems, there is a need for a backend database system. Netradar can be deployed in e.g. Google’s Cloud, Amazon AWS or on a  private cloud. We can even push our data into an existing data lake from where it can be further pushed to support current analytics processes. Thus there is no need to install expensive new hardware to take full advantage of the Netradar analytics.

Many legacy solutions use various speed tests to try to measure network performance. The challenge with all speed tests is that the test servers need to be built in such a way that they never become a bottleneck in terms of performance results. Any solution must make sure that the speed test always reflects the maximum performance of the network and the servers should not have any impact on this. In a world of high-speed networks, like fiber and 5G, setting up this speed test infrastructure is very costly and difficult. The fundamental challenge is that you never know beforehand how fast the network is, and therefore need to over allocate capacity so that the performance result is trustworthy. Think of 5G for instance, a user could get a top speed of anything between 10Mbps and 1 Gbps, which makes a 100-fold difference.

This inherent problem of speed measurements forces the infrastructure to be built with excess capacity just in case, and typically  barebone servers are needed to make the performance results at least somewhat trustworthy. Netradar does not have this serious shortcoming in terms of resource efficiency and cost of running the infrastructure.

Minimal Energy Usage

An important business decision when investing in any new product or service is the CAPEX vs OPEX analysis. A system might be reasonable to buy but to operate it increases the lifetime costs. In ICT, the OPEX is mostly about energy and with the increasing energy prices, the OPEX part of the calculation becomes increasingly large.

Netradar is a highly optimized and sustainable solution. Let’s look at the three components of the system from the energy usage perspective:

End point measurement agent

Netradar is collecting data primarily from customers’ Android phones. IOS could be technically supported but since the APIs are very limited, any Apple product would not help at all in network performance analysis (you can contact me for further details why this is so). As we integrate with various apps and run on the customer’s device (everything anonymized as GDPR has been our guideline for years), we simply must be extremely careful in how much we affect the consumer’s device and its energy consumption. Netradar analyses   customer’s own data traffic. When the device is being used, its display is on and radio is transmitting data, and only then Netradar is  active. The added energy consumption of Netradar at this stage is extremely small, well below 1%. When the consumer is not using the device, Netradar sleeps and does not consume energy.

Another important point is the amount of data transferred to measure network quality. Netradar uses small latency measurements to perform the analysis. Data is gathered on the end point and pushed from time to time to the backend. The combined data usage of both the latency measurements and the data upload is on average just 3MB/month. This is less than e.g. one view of a web page. With speed tests, we can estimate that the data usage is roughly the same as the indicated bit rate in bytes. For example, if I had a 200Mbps download and a 30Mbps upload, my device consumed 200+30MB of data, and if I had a 1 Gbps download result in 5G network, I used 1 GB of data. This data usage not only affects the customer’s device in terms of energy consumption but also the mobile network will need to transfer that artificial test data. All this consumes a lot of energy, and naturally consumes capacity from the other users of the network.

Latency measurements

The data usage of the latency measurements is extremely small. We have calculated that an average user consumes about 1.5MB/month of data to measure latency. This means that the impact is very small on the end device, on the wireless network and on the server infrastructure. Moreover, as our server software is highly optimized multi-threaded Linux binary written in C++, it runs very well even in a simple virtual server, and naturally can be run as a container. Thus, the resources needed to run our measurement infrastructure are minimal, almost non-existing.

Back-end data storage

Our system is flexible and can accommodate various different deployment architectures and data storage environments. The simplest deployment uses the cloud services of Google or Amazon, and benefits from their hard work on green data centers and distributed computing. We can also deploy the backend on a private cloud or even push the raw data to an existing data lake environment. The computing and storage requirements scale with the amount of data collected. Old data can be aggregated into trends and removed, and newer data can be used in deeper studies. Our customers are free to define data retention periods and thereby the effect on the backend resources needed.

In summary, the Netradar system is the world’s most sustainable mobile measurement system offering 24/7 analysis of end users’ connectivity. The amount of data collected by Netradar is huge while at the same time the whole system consumes very little energy. No devices need to be deployed anywhere as the system is fully virtual and software based. If sustainability is in your agenda, but you still want to understand network quality down to the smallest detail, there is only one solution worth considering.

Another important impact of Netradar is what it can offer to the overall sustainability goals for an operator. Firstly, there is no more need to run drive-through tests around a country. Secondly, having a wide and deep understanding of your network will be critical in optimizing the hardware deployment. Every base station and network node consumes energy and the less hardware there is, the lower the energy consumption. Yet, the amount of hardware deployed must match the needs of the customers and their expectations. With the Netradar solution wireless operators can invest where it matters the most.

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Understanding Latency in Modern Mobile Networks

Network latency as a KPI has gained more focus in recent years with the introduction of 5G networks. It is commonly understood as the time it takes for an IP packet to reach the destination and it is measured in milliseconds (ms). The lower the latency is, the faster data gets to the end point to create a given digital service. The bandwidth (bit rate, capacity) available in the network further affects the amount of IP packets that can be transmitted at the same time.

With 4G, latency dropped significantly compared to good old 3G, the first real mobile data service. 5G non-standalone and 5G standalone networks promise to enhance latency, along with high bit rates, even further down to 1 ms. But what is the network latency consumers really experience today in commercial mobile networks? How should you measure and understand latency? Can you interpret latency metrics in a novel way and understand better the performance of your network?

Where does latency come from?

While transfer bit rate reflects the lowest performance between the data source and the destination, e.g. the bottleneck speed between a server and mobile user, latency builds up in the network. The longer the path, the higher the latency typically is. Naturally physical and link layer technologies matter, all nodes on the path add some amount of latency and availability of network capacity finally dictates how quickly IP packets get through a router, switch or cellular base station.

In modern cellular networks, latency is primarily a sum of three components:

  1. Distance to the vantage point,
  2. Performance of the end points themselves, and
  3. Capacity of the wireless link.

The vantage point affects the absolute latency. If we measure the latency from the mobile device to the base station hardware, in favorable conditions we can get to as low as 1 ms. Yet, when we measure further away from the mobile device, the latency grows due to the physical distance and due to all the nodes in the path that need to process the IP packets. Still, it is worth noting that the distance dictates the lower bound of the latency, but does not directly affect the fluctuation of the latency (often referred to as jitter) nor the upper bound.

Core and access networks are primarily built with optical links and they are extremely fast. The resulting latency comes in most cases from the physical distance to a vantage point. Still, if a part of the network becomes congested, it will increase the latency and potentially create packet loss.

The end points themselves can also affect the latency. The latency is affected by how the end points, e.g. server and mobile device, handle the data. Today when discussing crowd-sourced measurement, smartphones are rather powerful and should not add any significant amount of latency due to the data processing. Servers can become a bottleneck if they become overloaded and thereby can introduce very significant latency into the measurements.

In a cellular network, the provisioning of radio connectivity is the most complex and difficult part. As the end users are mobile, they can be virtually in any location within the reach of the antenna signal. This forces the radio link to behave differently depending on the circumstances. There can also be any number of end users that need to be served with data, they move around creating handovers, and the type of apps and data transfer needs differ. In many situations, modern cellular technologies can handle this complexity and serve the end users well. But at times, the sheer load of these users and their apps can create congestion on the radio and force the base station to buffer incoming data before it can be transmitted on the downlink. The uplink can behave similarly, just that the data buffering is done on the mobile devices before they start to transmit their data over the radio link.

As modern cellular networks are built to offer reliable transfer of IP packets, it means that there has to be adequate buffer space to hold user data before it can be transmitted on the radio link. If capacity becomes an issue on a given base station, it will buffer user’s data and thereby increase the latency. This increased latency can be even one second in 5G networks, a thousand fold higher than the advocated 1ms latency.

How to measure the latency that matters?

With 5G, the mobile community has been advocating 1ms latency for the services. What is typically left unsaid is that such low latency refers to the connection between the mobile device and the base station running some form of edge service. So in essence this is the radio link latency. With WIFI, we get the same latency from the radio link.

Many legacy network measurement platforms separate data transfers and latency from each other. They measure latency on an empty radio link and then test data transfer speeds. This mode of operation seeks to show an optimistic latency, a theoretical lower bound that a customer could experience if he did not have any data transfer ongoing. Seldom people are using apps on their smartphones without any data transfer. Moreover, these platforms optimize the physical location of the measurement vantage point to be as close to the consumer as possible, to further lower the measured latency.

With Netradar, our customers do not seek to simply measure this best case latency. They want to understand the real latency as experienced by their end-users throughout their daily network usage. Netradar calculates over ten different latency-related metrics and can  store individual latency samples – downlink and uplink are studied separately. All this is coupled with extensive contextual information of the radio network to enable extremely accurate and detailed analysis of the quality of the cellular network.

Moreover, as highlighted earlier, the capacity and congestion of base stations increase the latency. Netradar’s proprietary algorithms (a form of AI) use the momentary bit rate of the app traffic coupled with latency and contextual information to indicate network capacity issues. The system is highly optimized and for a full month of detailed latency and capacity analysis, we use merely 2-3MB of data per user.

Real-world Examples

Netradar develops the core technology and AI to analyze the quality of cellular and WIFI networks. Our customers understand the difference between buying some legacy third-party crowd-sourced data and collecting detailed private data from one’s own network. When the real performance and development of the cellular network is critical, the data has to be reliable and extensive.

To support our technology development, we do our own data collection around the world. We use a network of distributed measurement points around the world and use a load balancer to measure latency to various vantage points.

Let’s take Finland and Germany as examples. I selected data that is measured to the same vantage point located in Frankfurt and filtered the data to only consider 4G or 5G connections across all mobile operators. The analysis shows that

  • The lowest latency in Finland was around 26ms while in Germany it was 12ms. The difference is natural because of the physical distance from Finland to Germany.
  • The average latency experienced by consumers in both Finland and Germany was 89 ms and 81 ms respectively. Considering the distance to the vantage point, Finns experience a slightly lower latency compared to the German consumers.
  • The highest latencies in both countries go way beyond one second.
  • Looking at average latencies that are over 100 ms for Germans and over 114ms for Finns (100ms+14ms for the physical distance), Finns encounter them 15% of the time and Germans 17% of the time.
  • When comparing 4G and 5G NSA, we see surprising numbers. The lowest latencies are slightly higher for 5G than for 4G while it should be the opposite. There is no significant difference in average and worst case latencies. As the data is analyzed across all national operators, there are differences and one low performing provider will affect the national results negatively. For example in the German data, we see one provider having systematically higher latencies in both 4G and 5G compared to the competition.

In summary, measuring the real latency of a cellular network and how the end users and their smartphones experience it has not yet been truly understood by the mobile industry. Moreover, Netradar uses the deep understanding of latency and its behavior to analyze network capacity shortages. Hopefully this article will trigger some new thinking in how cellular network performance should be measured and understood. You can always email me jukka.manner@netradar.com if you have any thoughts on the topic, and join our forthcoming webinar to learn more. Register here: www.netradar.com/webinar