Measuring Mobile Broadband Quality of Service in Cellular Networks: A Case Study of South West Nigeria
Abstract
Nigeria's Mobile Broadband (MBB) sector is battling with a significant Quality of Service (QoS) gap; with slow speeds, high latency, and inconsistent performance often falling short of advertised speeds and Service Level Agreements (SLAs) being common problems faced by mobile customers in the country. Often customers do not experience the advertised speeds offered by the Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) and MBB speeds are far slower than the worldwide average. To address these challenges, a robust QoS monitoring system was developed using a host and crowdsource-based approach. The methodology involves installing a custom made QoS MBB performance (MBPerf) application on 500 volunteers’ Android smartphones to measure five selected MBB QoS metrics – Domain Name System (DNS) Lookup, download and upload speed, latency and received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) in real time. The coverage area includes the six South West (SW) states of Nigeria while the three major MNOs in Nigeria – AIRTEL, GLO and MTN were tested for a period of nine months. Exploratory Data Analysis (EDA) carried out reveal that mobile users experience the best Internet speed performance between 11 pm and 6 am, while a downward and variable trend is experienced from 6 am till late in the evening at 11 pm. Comparative analysis of latency results with the industry benchmarks shows that all the MNOs significantly fell short of the benchmark by at least 74%. Findings from the DNS analysis suggests that MNOs’ DNS recursive servers are in general operating effectively and not adding significant delays to end users’ queries.
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