Stephen Temple

Recently I was pleasantly distracted by Ofcom’s Mobile broadband coverage checker when I dropped in on their web site. It has been up there for a while but was new to me. I was enticed into a second look. It was like going into the car sales show room to look at a glossy new car…what was I going to find under the bonnet?

On the face of it it looked like a very good idea to bring into one place the mobile broadband coverage maps of all the rival mobile networks.  Who wants to be locked into a 1-2 year contract with a mobile phone provider for one of these new fantastic smart phones only to discover when you arrive home that the local high speed data coverage turned out to be problematic to say the least and better coverage was actually possible from another mobile operator?

I decide to have a go with my post code address. I clicked on the first operator in the list. Up jumped an error message “… the server couldn’t find the page you requested, either because it is temporarily unavailable, has had its name changed or no longer exists.”

Not the greatest of starts but a trivial issue…an easily correctable broken web link. Happens all the time. For this exploration I left the Ofcom site and went directly onto that operator’s site that was working normally and then came back to the Ofcom site to test drive the remaining comparisons the tool offers.

Peering under the bonnet revealed that every single operator was not just using a different colour coding for their maps but quite different definitions of broadband coverage.  The colours ranged from 5 shades of orange (can’t remember which operator that was) to O2 using a rather fetching bold purple.

After the initial surprise with the colour differences came the much more serious differences of coverage terms and coarse granularity.  Here the bewildering menu before me was between 5 different scales of signal coverage ranging from low to excellent, three different combinations of indoor/outdoor coverage or two different combinations of…well just different things. What a tangle for the consumer wanting to make any sort of like for like comparison!

Knowing the guys at Ofcom you can be sure that they made every effort to produce a useful tool and deserve 10 out of 10 for having a go at bringing some transparency into the broadband coverage complexities. I award 2 out of 10 to the mobile industry for a grudging half hearted response. It is not that costly for the MNO’s to use the same colour ink for the purpose of the Ofcom site, use the same terms for describing the coverage scenarios and the same granularity.

It would be nice to leave the subject with a simple moan for standardised maps but I know the issue runs much deeper. In fact when I sat on the Digital Britain Steering Group I discovered that the different mobile operators had quite different approaches to the technical definition of what was meant by “broadband” coverage and the computer modelling tools they use to predict coverage were largely different (leading to potentially different localised results).

It is feasible, with a reasonable effort, to standardise not just the technical definitions for broadband coverage and presentation but the computer modelling tool the industry uses. There is even a good case for Ofcom to procure and make available to the industry a “standard coverage modelling tool” for their published coverage maps. This would go a long way to improve the comparative transparency for consumers.

However looming behind the computer generated coverage maps is a much bigger and more basic issue. Coverage predictions can never tell me the data speeds that I might expect as a result of a map showing me that I have “good” coverage – and that at the end of the day is what will matter to consumers connected to the mobile broadband Internet.

This is where things get really complicated.

First there are local topographical influences from large numbers of localised deep 3G coverage pot holes (that coverage maps average out) right down to just how wet the leaves are on the trees between the customer and the radio mast. Then there are a huge number of different circumstances for in-building coverage that are well beyond the capability of any map to sensibly illustrate. Less well known is that high rise flats have a big issue with single frequency networks due to seeing too many interfering signals (due to height elevation) that coverage appears to collapse even though the signal strength may be very strong.

As if all this wasn’t enough there is the related issue that the effective coverage in one radio cell can be profoundly affected by how busy the traffic in the adjacent cell is and within the cell itself the “effective” coverage for a particular data speed can shrink as the customer traffic builds up close to the base station.

We then add on top of this the whole fixed Internet story we are well familiar with of network capacity limits in the busy period ie the operators over-selling the capacity they have installed.

So as the future unfolds and the mobile broadband mobile Internet grows in importance – coverage maps that do not tell the real story could become a very big issue for consumers and particular as more people are likely to live at the edge of radio cells than at the centre (applying simple geometry) and many consumers are likely to expect  a service on their mobile devices every bit as good as they get with their fixed Internet connection.

This looks like a huge amount of work to do by the industry to head off the arrival of a  possible tsunami of complaints from unhappy smart phone owning customers finding themselves with a poor broadband mobile data speed performance.  After the way WAP disappointed the market it would be a pity if this new much more promising mobile Internet revolution were to lose momentrum as a result of a failure of the industry to effectively guide consumer through the above complexities. Some of the task is better done by the industry collectively and Ofcom should be encouraged to build upon the leadership it has already shown on the broadband coverage issue to foster an industry consensus on practical measures.

There may even be a case for some revolutionary new regulatory policies.