What Is This All About?

So what exactly is drive testing the 3 cellular networks and why is this information relevant to everyone?

The 3 wireless providers (Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile) make a lot of claims on who has the fastest, most-reliable, and available networks but I’ve always had a difficult time putting meaning to these claims without seeing raw data that is meaningful to me. This website is an attempt to justify these claims using real-results that I’ve obtained on my own. My hope is that this information is also helpful to other people.

There are a lot of measurements currently being made with way more sophisticated tools than I have. Some of these drive (and other) tests are performed by each wireless provider for various reasons. In some cases, the providers are testing for dead-zones (areas where signal coverage is weak or not available at all), reliability (do calls go through), or capacity planning purposes (how the network performs in heavily congested areas). The problem with the results from the providers themselves is that this information is hardly ever made public. There is some pressure from the FCC in regards to providers ensuring that their coverage maps are accurate so this is a great first-step. The coverage maps still doesn’t take into account the reliability or how congested the networks are.

There are other third-party services that do great jobs at providing information. Root Metrics is one source of this information that has its own merit. They produce reports monthly/quarterly and drive-test thousands of miles. The problem I have with their reporting is that it goes by market-area and doesn’t produce results at a suburb or neighborhood-level for their official reports.

Unofficially, Root Metrics and some other apps gather crowd-sourced data from users to measure this information as well. Open Signal is a popular one that uses this data to come up with results as well. Both of these apps color shade areas based on some metric that is being collected (whether it is data speed, signal strength, etc).

My problem with these tools is that it is coming from a lot of random users and we don’t always know how well their cell phone is working or even the date/time that measurements were taken. In some cases, the apps attempt to average out the results but this doesn’t account for how recently the measurements were taken (maybe this was last year before upgrades were made to the network).

I don’t claim that the data I will provide on this site is more accurate or better than anyone else. I don’t have the advanced-tools that the providers have or people to drive thousands of miles. I admit that measuring the performance of the cellular networks is a hobby. My background is computers and electronics so the metrics I gather have some meaning to me. I’m doing a lot of research and will lead everyone through this research as I add more blog posts.

The journey that I intend to take on this blog will be first, to guide everyone through some of the research I have done to find the best tools to perform the tests. Secondly, come up with the most accurate metrics to gather and produce some meaningful reports.

I will start in the Levittown, PA area (where I live). I may start out with a stationary report (address-level) that visualizes and compares the 3 providers during a 24-hour period. I hope to come up with a report-format that is easy to follow and understand over time. In the long-run (after I fine-tune the tools and tests that will be run), I will start drive-testing.

Look out for more blogs posts to come shortly.