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As hinted last week (here), network analyst firm Streetwave has confirmed that they’ve won yet another contract to map 4G and 5G based mobile broadband coverage using bin lorries, which will this time focus on the Liverpool City Region in Merseyside (England) and some 7,000km of the UK’s road network.
Streetwave has spent the past couple of years harnessing waste (bin / refuse) collection trucks to map mobile network coverage and speeds across various parts of the UK (e.g. here, here, here, here and here). In this setup, bin lorries are installed with several off-the-shelf Smartphones using software from Streetwave on top, which run continuous network tests as the vehicles go around their routes (once every 20 metres in rural areas and 5m in urban areas).
The data they collect is then being used by local authorities to help identify areas that may require additional intervention in order to improve local mobile coverage or network capacity. In addition, members of the public have also been given access to some of this data via address-based coverage checkers and interactive maps (example).
Streetwave thus plans to map the network quality across every road in the Liverpool City Council, Wirral Council, Sefton Council, Knowsley Council, St Helens Council and Halton Borough Council areas. The data they collect is usually a lot more accurate and informative than the estimates of mobile coverage offered by network operators themselves, which makes it extremely useful. Typically, it often only takes a few short months, once the study starts, for the first data to become available.