The CNMC, in charge of controlling the quality of fixed and mobile networks in our country, wants to launch a test to determine the mobile connection in rural and sparsely populated areas. To do this, they will not only need to install an app on users’ phones, but they will also try streaming services such as YouTube or RTVE Play.
From February 20 to March 21 of this year, the National Markets and Competition Commission has a new public consultation available. And all with the objective of knowing what methodology to use to collect data for the biennial study of service quality in rural areas of the country.
In this case, the main idea is to use users’ smartphones to know the quality of the mobile signal and even use streaming services such as YouTube to test streaming over the mobile network.
How will they collect the data?
With this consultation, what the CNMC intends is to establish the methodology that will be used to carry out the biennial study in question. To do this, they want to collect data from up to 150 municipalities that are considered rural municipalities (density less than 100 inhabitants/km2).
To carry out this study itself, the CNMC considers that it is necessary to combine the methodologies of ad-hoc testing (drive-test) and crowdsourcing to obtain knowledge of the quality of mobile service between rural and non-rural areas of the country.
In addition, it must be noted that crowdsourcing measures are achieved through an app that is installed on users’ mobile phones. There are applications that are used to measure network quality in which users must start the test and other apps in which data is collected autonomously from time to time.
What will be measured
In this study, mobile networks that belong to operators that have national concessions of the right to private use of the radio spectrum will be measured. In this case, it must be taken into account that there are 4 companies in Spain: Orange, Telefónica, Vodafone and Xfera. And for this, the different mobile networks will be tested: 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G NSA/5G SA.
Therefore, the aim is to directly measure both the level of coverage, its quality and its signal-to-noise ratio in these areas. In addition, the upload and download speed, latency or ping and jitter (variation), and packet loss will also be tested. And they are not the only parameters that will be measured to understand the user experience through the mobile network. Streaming through YouTube/RTVE Play and web browsing will also be measured. For the latter it will be “accessing the most visited pages of 6 different categories in Spain”, which right now are google.com, youtube.com,marca.com, elmundo.es, amazon.es and wikipedia.org.
In addition to data quality, the voice of the mobile network will also be tested. To do this, they will measure the calls that cannot be established, the time it takes for calls to be made and the number of times they can be interrupted by the mobile signal.
