In an increasingly competitive and customer-centric environment, telecom operators face the challenge of delivering an excellent network experience, beyond traditional technical indicators (coverage, signal quality, etc.). In this context, crowdsourced data has become a key tool to understand how customers perceive the quality offered by the network in access to different services, providing operators with a real, granular and customer-centric vision.
What is crowdsourced data?
It is data collected anonymously and securely through applications that users themselves use voluntarily, such as speedtest tools or tests that they initiate themselves. They can also come from SDKs (Software Development Kits) built into mobile apps, which perform technical measurements in the background without impacting the user experience or requiring additional interaction. These measurements allow us to know network quality indicators, such as: upload and download speed, latency, packet loss, jitter, response times, experience in services such as web browsing, video, social networks or VoIP, and never including information that could identify a particular user.
Why are they important for operators?
Crowdsourced data is critical for operators for a number of reasons, especially in the context of improving customer experience, optimizing network management, and making more informed decisions. That means:
- They allow detecting areas with poor coverage or congestion that do not appear in traditional models.
- They allow validating the impact of changes in the network.
- They help prioritize infrastructure investments where it truly impacts the customer experience.
- They compare performance against other operators.
- They reflect the real experience of users, which is impacted by various factors beyond the operator’s own network such as the user’s environment and device or connectivity to applications and services.
In addition, if the SDK is available in internal operator applications:
- Correlate incidents with real network data
- They facilitate faster and more personalized responses.
Apart from supporting the operation itself, it is increasingly common for telecommunications regulators to use crowdsourced data to offer a comparison of the networks that provide service in each country.
What are its limitations?
Although this is very valuable data, it should be considered as a complementary vision to network information and has certain limitations:
- The sample size is only a tasting of each operator’s plant and depends on the crowdsourcing provider’s agreements with third-party applications.
- It requires acceptance of permissions by the user who installs the application.
- There is no complete control over the device, environment, or timing of testing, which is highly dependent on the operating system.
- The frequency of testing is limited by battery consumption and mobile data quota.
If SDKs are installed in the operator’s application, greater control and access to a wider footprint of owned customers is gained, although other restrictions remain.
What is Telefónica’s vision?
For years, Telefónica has been committed to the use of crowdsourced data to strengthen its technical and quality processes. This information is used in key tasks such as network planning and optimization, as well as in the continuous improvement of the customer experience. In recent months, Telefónica has expanded capabilities to cover a wider range of use cases across the Group, ensuring a more complete and accurate view of network performance. Today, this strategy is present in a large part of our operations.
In short
Crowdsourced data represents an evolution in the way telecom operators understand and manage customer experience. By integrating this information into their technical and business processes, operators can deliver a smarter, more personalized network focused on what really matters: customer satisfaction.
