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Network analyst firm Streetwave has revealed that they’ve been chosen by the Gloucestershire County Council (GCC) in England to conduct a second real-world study of mobile network (4G, 5G) coverage and data performance across the region, harnessing 5,800km of the county’s road network and testing all three of the primary mobile networks – EE, O2 and VodafoneThree (Vodafone and Three UK).
Just to recap. Streetwave works by harnessing waste bin (refuse) collection lorries to map mobile network coverage and data speeds across various parts of the UK (e.g. here, here, here, here and here). In this setup, refuse trucks are installed with several off-the-shelf Smartphones using special software, which run continuous network tests (once every 20 metres in rural areas and 5m in urban areas) as the vehicles go around their routes.
The data they collect is often then used by local authorities to help identify areas that may require additional intervention in order to improve local mobile coverage and or network capacity, while also giving locals access to some of this data via address-based coverage checkers and interactive maps (https://app.streetwave.co/coverage-checker/).