Vodafone Ireland has conducted one of the first live trials of a technology that can pick out millions of fast-moving phone subscribers from their Call Detail Records (the logs of time, date, place, duration and type of communication that phone companies collect every time we use our mobiles) and produce live maps of how they are using their phones (and how rubbish the experience is).
The idea behind ‘mobile misery maps’ is to help phone companies improve their services around pain points on roads and railways, with one eye on the future of increasingly autonomous vehicles.
The maps mark each cell site along a route in ‘traffic light’ colours, from red to green. These can be filtered for specific call-quality indicators, including problems like low-quality VoLTE calls, slow video streaming or frequently dropped connections.
Integrating such data into car satnavs could potentially let us plan journeys around quality of mobile experience rather than the...