JamesCRR

Hi this is James from OpenSignal.

By "proprietary" we basically mean "here's a cool new metric (ps we invented it)" not "here's a cool new metric (ps we're not gonna tell you how it works)". That said the link to the methodology is a little buried, but you can find the details here: http://opensignal.com/methodology/time_coverage/

One thing to note is that it's possible that if you only launched LTE in urban areas and the LET users stay within those urban areas, then the time-coverage can be great, even if if the geographic coverage is poor and a low percentage of the population has access to LTE overall. Nonetheless, it is a measurement of the experience that those users that have LTE are getting.

Given this, we do have to be wary about markets where LTE is not mature yet.

Good point re. unlimited vs limited data plans and how the latter can make it easier for an operator to provide good throughput (but overall you might get less volume). This is illustrative of a bigger challenge - there's no single metric that can tell you: "this is the best operator in the world". We're never going to claim that. But our crowdsourced data can offer a global, impartial view that I think has been missing.

(This is James from OpenSignal)

I agree time coverage needs to be carefully interpreted - particularly when an deployment is focussed just in a city, a high time coverage percentage shouldn't be taken as meaning there is a strong nationwide deployment. But it does show the experience of the users who do have LTE.

For markets that have had LTE for longer, and with high LTE penetration (i.e. large percentage of subscribers using LTE), time coverage does show how effective the rollout as been.

Two more notes on why we've chosen to do this:

- Firstly geographical coverage is a little shaky - there are questions over how to factor in indoors/outdoors/under a bridge, cell breathing and other temporal fluctuations should be taken into account. The time coverage we use is unambiguous: we look at the proportion of time users have access to the LTE metric.

- Secondly: our crowdsourced methodology is focussed on measurement, not modelling. There are often very sparsely readings where we simply don't have LTE readings, we can't conclude unequivocally that there is no LTE there, or just no users. There are some ways we can get round this we can look into on (extrapolating from our cell maps), but for the moment we're much more confident in the time coverage (though caveats are required!)

Sure, I'm on a super hectic schedule, so it may just be a drink and some empanadas, but let's set something up.

+1 Funnily enough, I'm in Argentina right now working on the Android version of WifiMapper as we speak.

Would be interested to know the R-squared on the room-price correlation.

Conflicting information, I just talked with someone from Sensirion who was quite central to the the SHTC1 project, he confirmed it was NOT the waterproofing that was the issue and pointed out there are Japanese devices with the same chip that are waterproof, even to IP68 (2m depth).

WeatherSignal is a slightly different project to OpenSignal (but it's by the same people) - we're sharing data with several academic institutions and independent researchers, and will make the feed fully open. Also NB, PressureNet is a great project, WeatherSignal also collects pressure data but I think other sensors are relevant.

We have an algorithm in WeatherSignal that tries to determine whether users are indoors or outdoors - there's a roof icon that appears or disappears, try it, it's pretty accurate during the day time.

WeatherSignal project is basically funded by OpenSignal sales, we sell to carriers and regulators -- who can act on the data to improve service.

(I'm James Robinson, a co-founder of OpenSignal/WeatherSignal)