Coverage is Not Binary: Quantifying Mobile Broadband Quality in Urban, Rural, and Tribal Contexts

Cellular network performance does not cleanly generalize. A variety of factors, such as location, terrain, signal quality and network load, affect the performance of services delivered over LTE networks. As a result, the presence of LTE coverage does not always equate to usable service; coverage can be of poor quality, or it can be congested and difficult to access. Given that reliance on LTE networks for Internet connectivity has exploded, it is critical to understand the quality of experience for applications delivered over these networks in a variety of scenarios. To this end, we develop a robust measurement suite that we use to conduct a unique measurement campaign in tribal, rural, congested urban and uncongested urban regions, representing a variety of under-provisioned, congested, and well-provisioned operational LTE networks run by four major providers. Our analysis confirms that the performance of LTE networks in tribal and rural areas is typically worse than even heavily congested urban networks. More specifically, in the regions that we study, LTE networks in under-provisioned (tribal/rural) areas have 9\times poorer video streaming quality, 10\times higher video start-up delay, undergo more than 10\times the number of resolution switches, and lead to more than 2\times slower Web browsing experience as compared to urban deployments. We show that throughput and latency are 11\times and 3\times worse in tribal and rural locations, despite identical LTE carrier subscription plans.