Streetwave to Map 4G and 5G Mobile Coverage Across South Yorkshire
Network analyst firm Streetwave has revealed that they’ve won yet another contract to map 4G and 5G mobile broadband coverage and performance in England, which will this time see them testing along 6,000km of the road network within the four councils covered by the local authority’s Superfast South Yorkshire project.
Streetwave have spent the past two years harnessing waste (bin / refuse) collection trucks to map mobile network coverage and speeds in various parts of the UK (e.g. here, here, here, here and here). In this setup, refuse trucks are installed with several off-the-shelf Smartphones using special software on top, which run continuous network tests (once every 20 metres in rural areas and 5m in urban areas) as the vehicles go around their routes.
The data they collect is then used by local authorities to help identify areas that may require additional intervention in order to improve local mobile coverage and or network capacity. In addition, members of the public have also been given access to some of this data via address-based coverage checkers and interactive maps (example).
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The new deal will see mobile coverage quality being benchmarked across every road in each of the associated councils, including Barnsley Council, Sheffield City Council, Doncaster Council and the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council. Some 1,400,000 people live across this the region and will soon be able to access greater detail on local mobile connectivity.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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I can almost see what the press releases from the networks and Ofcom will say once the data reviewals that all the networks in and around Sheffield are slow albeit with pretty good signal strength on 4G but at best mediocre signal strength on 5G and that’s in the main urban areas, as soon as you get into the more rural areas, a lot of South Yorkshire is rural, the signal becomes almost nonexistent. For example, I was walking near a village that is only 15 minutes drive from Sheffield city (yes there are rural areas that close to the city) and there was no mobile coverage on O2 at all.
Where is the funding coming from? If it is public money, should not all the data be made public?
When they finish the work, they do make it public. For example, Brent Council’s analysis: https://app.streetwave.co/coverage-checker/70
@Read the article: I do not see any options to download all the data.