The Nottinghamshire County Council (NCC) in England has published some of the initial results from a project it undertook with Birmingham City University (BCU) and other local authorities, which mapped 4G and 5G mobile (mobile broadband) coverage in the County – helping to reveal areas of both poor and no signal.
The effort began in 2022 after NCC secured £20,000 from the Local Government Association (LGA) to fund its Digital Pathfinders project. Over the 18-month survey period, the project covered 7,723 roads in the districts and boroughs of Nottinghamshire, which needed more than 4,000 hours of driving and this accumulated around 7.7 million data points.
Various not-spots across the County were identified by this process – these are areas which lack sufficient coverage and have a signal strength of less than 125 decibel milliwatts (dBm) coverage. “This means that people in these areas, or those who travel across them, cannot make phone calls, send texts messages, or access the internet through mobile networks reliably,” said the study.
The initial findings from this study have indicated that ‘not spots’ exist in both urban and rural areas, such as Mansfield and Newark-on-Trent. Not spots were more present in rural and semi-rural environments. Interestingly, O2 has the “most promising picture“, with fewer not-spots across both 4G and 5G technologies compared to the other operators. It should be noted that 5G, whilst not as widely present as 4G, still presented not spots and poor signal areas.
By comparison to O2’s positive result, Three UK was found to have the “most not spots or bad coverage areas“. Whilst Three has a good 5G to 4G ratio, it still lacks moderate or excellent coverage in several areas, which can “make deploying use cases which require low latency and reliability difficult“.
Figure 1: Overall picture of where poor signal and 4G and 5G not-spots are located – red data points signify poor signal, blue signifies not spots
Unfortunately, the initial results lack much in the way of detail, while the visualisations provided are at a very low resolution and adopt the irritatingly vague ‘coloured’ dots approach. This is where a single dot actually covers quite a wide proportional geographic area and thus aren’t much help unless you can zoom-in close to see the correct representation, which you can’t.
The raw data is no doubt much more detailed than this and should produce quite an accurate map, although at present the public doesn’t have access to the full results and so it’s not much use to the rest of us. But no doubt the county council will be able to use this data to help direct future interventions and upgrades, although we’d still like to see the public being given access to all this.
NCC Statement
Nottinghamshire County Council will identify areas in the County that have poor or no mobile connectivity coverage. These areas will be prioritised for interventions and Officers will seek to lobby the MNOs and other partners to drive improved mobile connectivity in Nottinghamshire. We will consider suitable alternatives.
Looking further ahead, the Council will consider other opportunities and look to replicate the mobile connectivity mapping project in the future to maintain and update the data that has been gathered within the County. This will also mean we can track developments and changes in mobile connectivity as 6G is trialled and previous generations of mobile communications (e.g., 3G) become obsolete.
We will also be developing how we map against full fibre and fixed broadband availability so that we can get a complete picture of internet access, total not spots, or extremely slow speeds for use across sensors and mapping.