Mobile phone providers advertise with “up to bandwidths” of their network – but are these actually achieved? Salzburg Research systematically and continuously recorded the broadband availability in a federal state and provided a neutral, provider-independent database for evaluating mobile broadband availability.
Challenge
Broadband is increasingly becoming an infrastructure issue for regional development. Mobile phone providers advertise with “up to bandwidths” of their network – but are these actually achieved?
In rural areas in particular, coverage is sometimes insufficient. Thus, residents also complain repeatedly about insufficient bandwidth in the public sector. The federal state of Salzburg therefore needed a neutral, provider-independent database to assess mobile broadband availability throughout the state.
Solution
Over a period of several months, Salzburg Research recorded the availability of mobile broadband internet along state and federal highways throughout the state. For this purpose, small, mobile measuring devices were carried by vehicles of the state road administration (including clearing and gritting vehicles) during their normal journeys.
The measuring devices measured the quality of the mobile data connections in a centrally coordinated manner while driving. The measurement results were collected centrally, merged into a geographical visualization, and incorporated into SAGIS as an additional internal visualization layer.
Salzburg Research operates the measurement system based on the measurement and test software MINER. This enables us to assign and manage the measurement points in a centrally coordinated manner and visualize the measurement results.
Benefit
The measurements provided reliable, valid data to identify areas with poor network coverage. The state of Salzburg thus has a constantly growing database with over 10 million measurements on over 100,000 kilometers traveled. In the event of complaints from citizens, their subjective perception can now be compared with valid measurement data.
This database enables targeted measures for network expansion to be argued with the network operators. This closes supply gaps and, for example, optimizes work in the home office. In the measurement tool from Salzburg Research, various measurement tools and measurement methods can be linked and complex evaluations of the quality of Internet services of all kinds – e.g. also within a production site – can be implemented. The test orchestration tool has also been used in various other applications, including evaluating an application for coordinating and synchronizing software agents distributed around the world or evaluating a software solution offered for an international logistics company.
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