The Project Using Twitter to Map UK 4G, 5G Mobile Hotspots

A new UK Government funded project called NoServiceHere is hoping, among other things, to harness the power of the Twitter community in order to help identify areas (rural and urban) of poor mobile signal by curating geospatial data, which can then be used to help focus the rollout of 3G, 4G and future 5G networks.

NoServiceHere is a joint industry-academia research project that actually involves three different programmes, although in this case we’re more focused upon the £210,000 government funded (i.e. Cabinet Office) COCKPIT-5G (Crowd blackspot intelligence for 5G rollout) project; let’s just call that C5G for short. Network planning company Ranplan and the University of Warwick (UW) are also supporting the effort.

The project was officially announced in April 2019 and since then they have established their own website under NoServiceHere. The original press release was quite vague and merely talked about “using real-time machines” to help identify “black-spots” in mobile network coverage but we now know much more about it.

According to the project site, which is being led by Dr Weisi Guo (School of Engineering) and Prof Rob Procter (Dept. of Computer Science), they “want people to proactively Tweet issues they have, and show us the location of the problem by turning on their geo-location or tagging the location where the problem occurred.”

Dr. Sarunkorn Chotvijit, Research Fellow at the UW, told ISPreview.co.uk:

“Eventually, we want to make the UK a better connected UK. My intention is not to expose the users’ location or privacy, but to help leverage mobile provision and connectivity that lead to better user experience.”

A number of past studies have shown that social media activity (i.e. Tweets) can be used to do things like accurately predict the long-term data traffic demand for both the uplink and downlink channels, which is why the project team are now trying to raise awareness of their efforts and get people tweeting.

In short, they’re asking Twitter users to help by using geo-tagging and adding the #NoServiceHere hashtag (or #NoSignalHere) “whenever they want to complain or report about the problem of mobile services they encounter (indoor/outdoor) regardless of the mobile carriers,” said Dr. Sarunkorn.

One issue here is that people rarely tweet with a geotag (only 1% of Twitter users make use of it) and that’s because, by default, Twitter turns location information off, although it can be enabled in the settings under ‘Privacy and safety‘. Once enabled Twitter will collect, store, and use your precise location, such as GPS information (location info. is then added to your tweets). Of course not everybody will want to do this.

The other problem for the project is that in June 2019 Twitter announced that they were going to remove precise geotagging, except on photos (here). “Most people don’t tag their precise location in Tweets, so we’re removing this ability to simplify your Tweeting experience. You’ll still be able to tag your precise location in Tweets through our updated camera. It’s helpful when sharing on-the-ground moments,” said the network.

However after a rush of complaints Twitter was later forced to clarify that they “haven’t changed general location tagging. You’ll still be able to add a location to all Tweets (like a city or a restaurant). It’s the precise location feature that’s been removed from Tweets.” This does make the project’s job harder but still viable, if enough people participate. Of course that’s the next challenge, getting the word out.

Dr. Sarunkorn told us that they collect data from Twitter just like the normal process of data retrieval (API request), although he acknowledges that the accuracy can be varied depending on the users’ input and how “honest they are” as they can manually tag the location they prefer. “That’s why we try to inform them that if they do it correctly, this will help and impact not just in their community but at the national level,” said the Doctor.

So if you’re in an area of poor or no mobile signal and happen to have a twitter account, then please do try to help the team by tagging where those locations are (both indoor and outdoor). You can also view the teams Twitter Account.