Viva La France!

If you watched the Olympics then you know about the rivalry between the American and French men's swimming teams. In the relay race, France publicly predicted victory, but America prevailed. In the relay race the US outperformed France, but what about mobile data services, which country gets the "Gold"?

Here at Keynote we track the performance and availability of mobile services in the US and other countries around the world. One of the things we can do is create a "visual fingerprint" of how well a particular service actually performs. We can then compare how well a particular type of mobile service works in different locations around the world.

During the Olympics we are tracking the performance and availability of a few popular mobile portals focused on delivering sports news. Our global monitoring system opens up a mobile connection in different countries and retrieves the home page of the sports site in the exact same manner as a person holding a real handset. We track the time it takes to deliver the page and we also track any problems in the content or errors with the operator networks.

First let's look at the sports site in the US starting on August 8th. The graph shows the "availability" of a top mobile Olympic site. Each colored line represents a different network operator. Lines moving toward the bottom of the graph means that the service is experiencing various types of errors. Availability numbers approaching 80% or below is a strong indication that real people are having trouble accessing the content. By comparison, accessing desktop "web" content over the wired internet usually has a success rate in the high 90's.

You might imply that the availability problems shown in the graph above are due to the content of this one particular mobile site and not the carrier networks. That would be a fair position to take, but in fact when we look at other top mobile sports sites we see similar patterns where the top carrier networks seem to have a lot of little "glitches" that prevent users from successfully accessing desired content.

Now let's take a look at a mobile sports site in France. The graph also measures how well the mobile content page can be accessed across three popular operator networks in France.

    

The top operator networks in France seem to be doing much better than their American counterparts. One French operator in "Pink" had a few glitches, but the overall availability of even this operator is still in the high 90's. One operator is actually running at 100% availability (there is a dark blue line running across the top of the graph). That definitely earns "Gold".

So when comparing the reliability of top network operators in the US and France, all we can say is

Viva La France!

Comments

[Eddy]

What's the point of a such analysis that does not give details on operators? Names, please! We want names...for the overall benefit of both operators and customers....unless I missed something.

As a side note, I am very proud of how France is doing both in mobile internet access and fixed high bandwidth (FTTH). No doubt France has the capacity to renew the great success shown in ADSL deployment and marketing (ratio price/bandwidth) with FTTH.

So as you said, Vive La France! but please give the names of the operators concerned in this analysis unless it's confidential.

[guigui]

Yeeaahhh

On aura pas toutes les médailles, mais on aura celle-là^^ Comme quoi mes TIC en France, ça fonctionne bien =)

[Tony Perez]

Thanks Eddy for your comment. The main goal of our blog is to raise awareness of what could potentially be monitored in a mobile environment. In many projects we can not release specific details but we try to provide enough information to highlight an observed problem with a mobile service or network. In most cases we have to present the information in a generic way, but hopefully it serves as an example of how our services could be used in a production environment. Keynote’s commercial customers do have access to the details of benchmarking information and can study the behavior of the operators or the behavior of content delivered from a mobile site.

Thanks for your readership.