Public reporting

Transparency

Our metrics

Common Coverage Areas

In Tutela's mobile benchmark reports, when comparing the performance of mobile operators we only consider locations where all operators in the comparison provide service (and exclude results taken in locations where some providers offer coverage, but others do not). We call these Common Coverage Areas (CCAs).

By comparing operators only in like-for-like coverage locations, we remove biases such as cases where an operator provides extended coverage in rural locations (often at lower speeds due to use of low-band spectrum) which may unfairly reduce their average performance relative to an operator which only provides coverage in urbanized areas.

Consistent Quality

Consistent Quality is Tutela’s metric used to measure overall user experience. It represents the amount of time (as a percentage) that users have a good enough network performance required to deliver a good experience on all major application types. It spans two tiers of mobile user experience, “Excellent” and “Core”, that each represents a range of use cases. “Excellent” represents use cases including mobile HD video streaming, group video calls or streaming video games, while “Core” represents less demanding use cases like SD video streaming or web browsing.

Visit our Consistent Quality page for more information. 

Coverage

Tutela measures relative coverage between providers in a country by looking at the geographic area that an operator’s subscribers have seen coverage, compared to the total area of the country where the subscribers of any operator can get a mobile connection. The geographic area covered by each operator, relative to the total covered area of the country, is presented as a score out of 1,000.

Tutela measures this coverage from the perspective of end users, inclusive of times when coverage is provided as part of a domestic roaming agreement or shared infrastructure program. An equal number of representative samples are considered from each operator in a country to determine coverage. Coverage is assessed over the preceding 12 months to ensure any effects of seasonality are appropriately included.

Video

Tutela executes background video testing on devices using an Adaptive Bit Rate (ABR) protocol. We test against major content providers including YouTube and Amazon to reflect the same end-to-end video streaming traffic used by mobile users every day. Our video streaming score is determined based on a range of video specific KPIs including stall rate, resolution and buffering time. 

Download speed

For our public reports, Tutela uses the results of 2MB file download speed tests. This file size simulates typical user behaviour such as downloading a web page, email with attachment, or buffering a video. This result does not calculate the maximum download throughput obtainable on the network when downloading a large file, which is often higher. We use this smaller file size as it closely represents typical user behaviour, unlike a large file size to measure peak potential speeds.

Upload speed

Tutela uses a 1MB file for upload throughput speed tests, simulating uploading a medium definition image to social media. As with download speed, this does not calculate the maximum upload throughput obtainable on the network but the representative throughput a user may experience.

Latency

Latency is the time it takes for data to be transferred, measured in milliseconds (ms), determined as half of the round-trip travel time of each packet from the time the packet is sent from the Tutela SDK to when the same packet is received.