Opensignal study finds UK mobile broadband networks can handle AI

Network benchmarking firm Opensignal, which examines mobile network performance by gathering crowdsourced data from users of their testing App, has published a new study that attempts to examine conversational AI readiness across text, voice and video interactions. Overall the UK has a good readiness score, but not without some weak points.

We’re often being told that next generation broadband and mobile networks are key to supporting the development of AI, at least our access to such services. But the reality is that most ordinary people (i.e. consumer level access) don’t require a significant internet connection upgrade to be able to get the most out of AI.

For example, Opensignal’s research suggests a text interaction (prompt) needs just 0.01Mbps of download and 0.2Mbps of upload speed – just a fraction of what modern 4G and 5G mobile broadband connections can usually deliver.

Moving from text to voice interactions with AI adds conditions around network responsiveness and stability (latency, jitter and packet loss). Moving from voice conversations to video interactions then brings higher upload requirements (2Mbps+) on top of that. For voice, a speed of just 0.2Mbps is enough to transceive high quality audio in both directions, although latency times need to be below 50ms (milliseconds) and the other measures are also tougher on older mobile technologies.

Overall, Opensignal found that the average AI text readiness across all 140 countries tested was 74% (i.e. percentage of tests achieving the threshold), reflecting 117 countries. However, this falls to 83 of 140 measured countries who are text AI ready at least 75% of the time. Furthermore, as AI interactions get more challenging this number drops. For voice, 45% of countries meet this 75% threshold, while for video this drops to 39%.

By comparison the United Kingdom’s Mobile AI Readiness score for text comes out at 92.6%, while for voice it’s 87.3% and for video it’s 79.9%. This makes the UK one of the stronger countries, albeit not yet perfect. The full report goes into a lot more detail, although sadly it doesn’t include a deeper country-specific or operator-specific analysis, which would have helped to give a useful degree of context.

Just for a quick comparison (Opensignal doesn’t produce a neat table for all this). The USA scored 89.2% for text, 84.3% for voice and 76.7% for video, while France scored 94.7% for text, 90.4% for voice and 83.1% for video. Broadly, most of the EU delivered similar sorts of scores, while Africa and the Middle East were further behind.

As usual the catch here is that mobile network performance is highly variable between individual users, devices and their locations, thus your own experiences may vary – often dramatically. Not that this will matter once AI wipes out humanity, likely after getting tired of so many feeble humans expending its significant resources to create AI generated slop videos of cats.. among many other things etc. Yay.