Operational Excellence
Beginning with this year’s P3 connect Mobile Benchmark in the UK, we start to complement our measurements with an additional, crowdsourced assessment of service availability. In this discipline of our 2017 benchmark, Vodafone and O2 are ahead, achieving the full score of 30 points.
An additional important aspect of mobile service quality – above performance and measured values – is the actual availability of the mobile networks 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 and walktests described on the previous pages. We are convinced that crowdsourcing can significantly enhance the aspects of benchmarking: Drivetesting and walktesting has obvious advantages as a very controlled environment, while crowdsourcing accele-
rates when looking for longer time periods or geography beyond defined test routes. So, when it comes to diagnose 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 UK mobile network test at hand is the first occasion where we expand our scoring scheme with the results of this crowdsourced investigation. As we have considered the results from July, August and September 2017 and each month is represented by a maximum of ten achievable points, this time 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 unter "Methodology" . As a consequence of this addition, the P3 connect Mobile Benchmark is the only mobile network test which combines both aspects (drivetesting and walktesting as well as crowdsourcing) and thus provides the most comprehensive view on network performance.
The collection of crowdsourced data is based on app like “U get“ (see "Participate in our Crowdsourcing" below) and others, that constantly perform and report anomysed service availability measurements in the background.
Crowdsourcing shows mostly stable UK networks
The in-depth analysis of our crowdsourcing data gathered in the three months preceding and including our measurement campaign in the UK, shows that the UK networks are all in all very stable and reliable. For Vodafone and O2 we did not observe any degradations in the observation period.
In the relevant months, EE only suffered a one hour service degradation on the early afternoon of August 21st. According to our scoring principle, this one-hour degradations costs one point – so EE scored a total of 29 out of 30 possible crowd score points.
In the Three network, we determined an incident that happened during the afternoon and evening of September 7th (exactly from 5pm to 9pm), adding up to a total service degradation of five hours on this day. According to our crowd scoring scheme, that costs one point for the affected day plus another point for the time period of up to six hours. So, Three achieves a crowd score of 28 out of 30.
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 have the capacity to change the actual ranking in the UK. However, for next year, we plan to consider a larger number of months and consequently to increase the share that our crowd score has in the total result.
Operational Excellence At A Glance
Considering July, August and September of 2017, we could
only determine a one-hour degradation in the EE network and
a five-hour incident in the Three network. For the networks of Vodafone and O2, we did not observe any relevant incidents.
As we considered a three month period this time, which contributes 30 to the total maximum of 1000 achievable points, EE scores 29 out of 30 points and Three reaches 28 out of 30. Vodafone and O2 receive the full amount of 30 crowd score points.
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 or via the adjoint QR code. “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.