27 October 2011

Reporting mobile blackspots

27 October 2011 | caf

In the spirit of the recent posts on enhancing your mobile Internet speeds with wok-fu and mobile broadband signal loss, I thought I’d share a link to Telstra’s Mobile Coverage Feedback form.

You can use this to report areas on Telstra’s network that are supposed to have coverage, but experience congestion / dropouts. According to the page this “…will assist our Mobile Technicians and Engineers to drive constant improvements to Telstra’s mobile networks.”

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m_ratt12:06 pm 27 Oct 11

How do you propose that the Telco’s map call dropouts against positional data. They can only position using ranging and triangulation (ie distance from multiple towers), however those very distance estimates are affected by the very same factors that affect actual coverage…..
Basically, because signal quality is bad, the phone appears further from the tower than it actually is, thus estimated blackspots will be in the wrong place.

Henry8211:14 am 27 Oct 11

qbngeek said :

do you expect them to just start mapping out the whole country by looking for reconnections to the network.

Yes, I think its not a bad start. Dropped calls and reconnections to the network would show black-spots and out of range areas of the mobile network. If they mapped it with GIS software, they’d progressively get large “doughnuts” of black spots on their maps. IMO i could probably do it with the right data (and a license for ArcGIS).

qbngeek9:56 am 27 Oct 11

Henry82 said :

Surely they could work this out automatically rather than relying on user reports. Phones automatically connect back to the network when the signal is found again, they could use this to map blackspots.

The problem is that sometimes the blackspots appear where they shouldn’t and that can make mapping them harder. They also don’t know where to look if you don’t tell them, do you expect them to just start mapping out the whole country by looking for reconnections to the network.

For example, when I was with Vodafail there I noticed a blackspot as you go over the hill on Hindmarsh Drive where calls would always dropout regardless of what phone I used. There was another one in a certain spot at Brindabella Park and a similiar one to that in Woden.

In the end I dumped Vodafail because I couldn’t get reliable coverage in Woden or Queanbeyan.

Henry829:44 am 27 Oct 11

Surely they could work this out automatically rather than relying on user reports. Phones automatically connect back to the network when the signal is found again, they could use this to map blackspots.

welkin319:35 am 27 Oct 11

Here is a site where you can make a detailed airphoto-map of your district and see who has mobile service aerials and the exact locations. http://maps.spench.net/

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