Streetwave to survey mobile broadband coverage across Gloucestershire again

Network analyst firm Streetwave has revealed that they’ve been chosen by the Gloucestershire County Council (GCC) in England to conduct a second real-world study of mobile network (4G, 5G) coverage and data performance across the region, harnessing 5,800km of the county’s road network and testing all three of the primary mobile networks – EE, O2 and VodafoneThree (Vodafone and Three UK).

Just to recap. Streetwave works by harnessing waste bin (refuse) collection lorries to map mobile network coverage and data speeds across 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, 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 often 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, while also giving locals access to some of this data via address-based coverage checkers and interactive maps (https://app.streetwave.co/coverage-checker/).

Streetwave did in fact survey Gloucestershire’s mobile coverage a couple of years ago as part of the wider River Severn Partnership Advanced Wireless Innovation Region (RSPAWIR), so the new study will allow the GCC to track how coverage has changed since the previous survey. The survey itself will probably take a few months and the results and thus likely to surface sometime in the first half of 2027.