High-end LTE service evolution in Korea: 4 years of nationwide mobile network measurements

Abstract

This paper provides a temporal cellular and WiFi networks analysis from a nationwide crowdsourcing measurement study. Our dataset consists of 2.98M user-initiated quality tests on 3G/LTE/WiFi involving 157K mobile devices from Nov. 2012 to July 2016 (187 weeks) in South Korea. Our analysis explains changes in QoS from the user perspective, not Mobile Network Operators (MNO). We revealed that WiFi shows twice higher compounded quarterly growth rate for download throughput against LTE. Yet, LTE and WiFi show almost no difference in absolute download throughput value as of mid 2016. Second, LTE delivers relatively low latency, less-varying loss rate, and higher throughput in overall. Finally, the result shows that the evolution for the high-end LTE services has been faster than user adoption, where the majority of the LTE users stays below 75 Mbps of throughput.