Mobile Network Performance from User Devices: A Longitudinal, Multidimensional Analysis

In the cellular environment, operators, researchers and end users have poor visibility into network performance for devices. Improving visibility is challenging because this performance depends factors that include carrier, access technology, signal strength, geographic location and time. Addressing this requires longitudinal, continuous and large-scale measurements from a diverse set of mobile devices and networks. This paper takes a first look at cellular network performance from this perspective, using 17 months of data collected from devices located throughout the world. We show that (i) there is significant variance in key performance metrics both within and across carriers; (ii) this variance is at best only partially explained by regional and time-of-day patterns; (iii) the stability of network performance varies substantially among carriers. Further, we use the dataset to diagnose the causes behind observed performance problems and identify additional measurements that will improve our ability to reason about mobile network behavior.