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Verizon's 'Can You Hear Me Now' Fleet Testing 4G
itwbennett writes "On the sidelines of the CTIA trade show in San Diego last week, Verizon showed off one of its test vehicles, a Chevy Tahoe equipped with a variety of phones and mobile data devices. The devices make voice and data calls over the air and are wired up to testing equipment in the back of the truck. The carrier has about 100 such vehicles around the U.S., and testers drive about 1 million miles (1.6 million kilometers) per year while conducting ongoing network tests, said Tom Badger, director of network system performance. One thing Verizon doesn't use: the well-known phrase from its TV commercials."
somebody had a rough drive in this morning.
GSM towers will report unexpected drops of calls and various metrics for the quality, however, in my experience, users will often report a subjective version of this which can often be quite skewed. By using actual equipment in the field you will be able to find gray spots (and black spots) in your setup and you will be more able in finding issues with call transfers between cells etc. - and those can often be linked with user complaints (and yes, the call will have some information about users whereabouts in the time of the call, it is however very unreliable for detecting gray/black spots).
I think what the O.P. meant was that the handsets (millions of them) could be providing this feedback at all times with just small ancillary data on the uplink. Things like SNR, error rates, etc, could be reported in real-time at all times or selectively enabled by the towers when segments are being measured. This would composite all sorts of users, all sorts of chipsets, photes, locations, etc. With location services enabled, the phones can tell the towers where they are when these measurements come through.
Throw it all up on a fancy visualization and you can get a lot of information over different times of day, weather conditions, etc. No need for a bunch of trucks. Sure, the trucks can provide more information with better measurement equipment. But in many cases, lots of cheap devices can produce better data and fewer expensive devices as long as the proper statistical processing is applied.