Operational Excellence
As an addition to our methodology, we have complemented our measurements with a new, crowdsourced assessment of service availability. In the 2017 P3 connect Mobile Benchmark in Spain the operational excellence results are included in the total score.
An additional important aspect of mobile service quality – complementing performance and measured values – is the actual availability of mobile connectivity to the customers. Obviously, even the best performing network is only of limited benefit to its users, if it is frequently impaired by outages or disruptions. Therefore, P3 has been looking into additional methods for the quantitative determination of network availability: collecting data via crowdsourcing. This method must however not be confused with the drivetests described on the previous pages. We are convinced that crowdsourcing can significantly enhance the aspects of benchmarking: Drivetesting has obvious advantages as a very controlled environment, while crowdsourcing accelerates when looking for longer time periods or geography beyond defined test routes. So, when it comes to diagnosing the sheer availability of the respective mobile networks, a crowdsourcing approach can provide additional insights. Therefore, P3 has developed an app-based crowdsourcing mechanism in order to assess how a large number of mobile customers experience the availability of their mobile network. We call this aspect “operational excellence”.
The P3 connect Mobile Benchmark in Spain is one of the first occasions where we expand our scoring scheme with the results of this crowdsourced investigation. As we have considered the results from August, September and October 2017, and each month is represented by a maximum of ten achievable points, in the benchmark at hand, the so called “crowd-score” contributes up to 30 points to the total result.
The detailed methodology of our analysis and the calculation of the resulting points is described below. As a consequence of this addition, the P3 connect Mobile Benchmark is the only mobile network test which combines the two aspects drivetesting and crowdsourcing, thus providing the most comprehensive view on network performance.
Operational Excellence At A Glance
Considering August, September and October of 2017, we could determine a one-hour degradation in the Vodafone network and an incident in the Yoigo network that due to our nightly hold-off interval only counts as one hour. For Movistar and Orange, we did not observe any relevant incidents. As we considered a three-month period, which contributes 30 to the total maximum of 1000 achievable points, both Vodafone and Yoigo score 29 out of 30 points, while Movistar and Orange both score the full 30 points.
Crowdsourcing shows Spanish networks are highly reliable
The in-depth analysis of our crowdsourcing data gathered in the three months preceding and including our measurement campaign in Spain, shows that the Spanish networks are all in all very stable and reliable. As degradations observed in the night hours between 0.00 a.m. and 6.00 a.m. are not accounted for, we did not register any incidents for Movistar and O2 during the observation period.
In the relevant period, Vodafone only suffered a one hour service degradation in the evening of October 2nd. According to our scoring principle, this one-hour degradation costs one point – so Vodafone scored a total of 29 out of 30 possible crowd score points.
In the Yoigo network, we registered an incident that occurred in the early morning of August 16th. As we only count degradations after 6.00 a.m., this also led to a take-off of one point. For this reason, also Yoigo scored 29 out of 30 possible points in total in the operational excellence category.
While these reductions of service availability were certainly annoying to the customers of the affected networks, they only have a limited impact to the overall results and did not change the actual ranking in Spain. However, for next year, we plan to consider a larger number of months and will increase the share that our crowd score has in the total result.
Participate in our crowdsourcing
Everybody interested in being a part of our “operational excellence” global panel and obtaining insights into the reliability of the mobile network that her or his smartphone is logged into, can most easily participate by installing and using the “U get” app. This app exclusively concentrates on network analyses and is available under uget-app.com. “U get” checks and visualises the current mobile network performance and contributes the results to our crowdsourcing platform. Join the global community of users who understand their personal wireless performance, while contributing to the world’s most comprehensive picture of the mobile customer experience.