{"id":19297,"date":"2019-08-26T00:01:25","date_gmt":"2019-08-25T23:01:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/?p=19297"},"modified":"2019-08-27T15:57:33","modified_gmt":"2019-08-27T14:57:33","slug":"the-project-using-ai-and-twitter-to-map-uk-4g-5g-mobile-notspots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ispreview.co.uk\/index.php\/2019\/08\/the-project-using-ai-and-twitter-to-map-uk-4g-5g-mobile-notspots.html","title":{"rendered":"The Project Using Twitter to Map UK 4G, 5G Mobile Hotspots"},"content":{"rendered":"

A new UK Government funded project called NoServiceHere<\/a> 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<\/a>, 4G<\/a> and future 5G<\/a> networks.<\/p>\n

NoServiceHere is a joint industry-academia research project that actually involves three different programmes, although in this case we’re more focused upon the \u00a3210,000<\/strong> government funded (i.e. Cabinet Office) COCKPIT-5G<\/a><\/strong> (Crowd blackspot intelligence for 5G<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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

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<\/em>.”<\/p>\n

Dr. Sarunkorn Chotvijit, Research Fellow at the UW, told ISPreview.co.uk:<\/strong><\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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