A comparative study of user experienced mobile broadband performance

Abstract

Even though the proliferation of handheld mobile communication devices has deepened Internet and broadband penetration in Nigeria, users of such services may not have detailed quantitative performance comparison between the services provided by different network operators. The study here reported is therefore an attempt to bridge the information gap. A measurement testbed based on the Raspberry Pi platform was developed to autonomously measure the mobile broadband performance of third generation (3G) and fourth generation (4G) broadband networks of the four major mobile network operators in the country. Under static access conditions, the system was set up to measure the upload throughput, download throughput and latency from a user-centric perspective. The measurements were taken by simultaneously sampling the networks of four mobile broadband service providers (9Mobile, Airtel, Globacom and MTN) over a period of three weeks in the city of Uyo, Nigeria. The results obtained revealed that Airtel achieved the highest peak download rate for 3G throughput, and this was only 1.41 Mbps higher than the least performing MNO. Also, it was found that MTN’s download rate peaked at 35.06 Mbps, and this was over 300% of the rate achieved by the fourth rated network in terms of the 4G download throughput metric. The measurement results also revealed that peak usage periods, defined as the hours between 7pm and 11pm, witnessed higher variability in throughput rates than other periods.