Category: Mobile Phone Service

Screenshot showing the updated coverage map

Major Coverage Map Update

Christian Leave a comment

Today, I released a significant update to the coverage map.

Update 1: New Data For All Networks

The updated map incorporates the most recent round of data from the FCC’s Broadband Data Collection program. The new data came out last month and represents networks’ coverage as of mid-2023.

The recency of data improved by about six months for all networks. The difference between map versions is especially apparent with Dish’s network. Earlier this year, the company abruptly activated a large portion of its network to meet an FCC obligation. Since that activation occurred in June, it wasn’t captured in the previous version of the map.

I’ve also updated the map of crowdsourced coverage. Compared with the last version, more than double the amount of data underlies the latest crowdsourced map.

Update 2: Calibration Model – Powered By DIMO

The FCC’s metric for signal strength assesses something different from the on-the-ground signal strength consumers are expected to experience. Additionally, there’s a risk of network operators incorrectly reporting coverage. To compensate, the data underlying Coverage Critic’s map now runs through a calibration model.

The calibration model is powered by a trove of DIMO data assessing cell coverage throughout the US. After feeding in a specific network, signal information from the FCC, and a bit of location-specific information, the model predicts actual signal strength.1

The calibration model may be Coverage Critic’s most significant innovation since the map launched. And it will improve with time. Future map versions may incorporate more data, hyper-local adjustments, and additional factors predictive of signal quality.

Update 3: Improved Infrastructure

I rebuilt much of the infrastructure underlying the map. Releasing new versions of the map should be easier now. I’ve also laid the groundwork for better content and improved network-scoring systems on other parts of Coverage Critic. A few changes have effects that are already apparent. E.g., coverage information now displays correctly along state borders.

USA Map Abstract Showing Concept Of Network Connections

Helium Mobile Goes Nationwide

Christian Leave a comment

In August, Helium Mobile launched a $5 per month unlimited plan that was exclusively available in the Miami area. At the time, I wrote:

It’s arguably the cheapest unlimited plan on the US market. But the price is kind of contrived.

Peter Adderton, founder of Boost Mobile and current CEO of MobileX, offered a valid correction:

Nationwide Service – $20 Per Month

Today, Helium Mobile launched expanded service. While $5 per month pricing continues for those in the Miami area, people throughout the US can now get service for $20 per month plus taxes.

It’s a pretty sweet deal for what’s essentially T-Mobile service. I’m not confident it’s the cheapest unlimited plan in the US, but it’s a strong contender. In all but the most tax-intensive locations, I think Helium Mobile comes out cheaper than unlimited plans from US Mobile and Visible that start at $25 with taxes baked in.1

2 Points People Miss

I’ve been disappointed by the press coverage of Helium Mobile (both positive and negative). Journalists are missing two key points:

  1. The Helium project has an ambitious goal of building out a network that could allow Helium Mobile to achieve cost savings over conventional MVNOs. Meaningful cost savings have not been achieved yet.
  2. Today, Helium Mobile’s low prices are enabled by what’s effectively a subsidy from investors.

While a $20 plan may not be as unprofitable as a $5 plan, a small MVNO will still take significant losses on a mass-market plan at that price point. That said, it’s pretty normal for new carriers to offer plans that aren’t profitable in hopes of one day reaching economies of scale or achieving new kinds of cost-efficiency.

How Much Does The Average American Pay For Cell Service?

In a Tweet, Helium Mobile compared its $20 per month rate to a $157 per month figure from JD Power. The latter figure allegedly represents what the average American spends on their phone plan.

In a press release, Helium Mobile doubles down on the comparison and describes its new offering as such:

Unlimited data, text and talk that is almost 8X more affordable than the average U.S. cell bill

$157 is the wrong number for the comparison Helium Mobile is making. It’s way too high.

JD Power charges for access to the study, so I’ll only speculate. I’d guess JD Power is looking at the average expenditure of entire households. Most households have multiple people and multiple phone lines. Perhaps the costs of device subsidies or device financing are also sneaking into JD Power’s numbers.

I don’t think prospective customers are being harmed. People care about (1) what they pay for their current carrier and (2) how much less they might pay for Helium Mobile. The average American is irrelevant. Perhaps the comparison could confuse investors, but I doubt many are getting fooled. More than anything else, pushing the $157 statistic makes Helium Mobile look silly.

Screenshot of a coverage map showing a green/red color scheme.

Updated Map Color Schemes

Christian Leave a comment

A major update to the coverage map is coming shortly, but I wanted to release a small, interim update first.

With the update released today, the map now defaults to a green-red color scheme for all networks. While the brand-specific colors used previously were kind of fun, I don’t think the meaning of different shades was intuitive. Further, the branded color scheme didn’t work well for making comparisons between multiple networks.

Two new color schemes (blue-yellow and grayscale) have also been added. These color schemes may offer better accessibility for colorblind individuals. Map users can switch to the new color schemes and the old branded color schemes from the map’s settings menu.

Feedback on the changes is welcome. I’ll likely tweak the color schemes when the major map update comes out later this year.

Abstract icon representing the idea of a refresh or an update

FCC Releases Broadband Map V3

Christian Leave a comment

Today, the FCC announced the release of the third version of the National Broadband Map. The map shows the availability of internet service providers and cellular coverage throughout the US.

Improved Reliability

The FCC suggested the map is becoming more reliable with successive versions:

Challenges, verifications and audits are all making the Map better. Robust participation in the challenge processes continues to play a valuable role in correcting data shown on the Map. To be specific, the results of 4.8 million challenges to provider reported availability information and over 1.5 million accepted location challenges. Since our last release, we’ve initiated mobile coverage audits in a number of states. We’ve also seen hundreds of corrections to provider reported data based on FCC-initiated verification efforts.

Newer Data

With the recent release, a new round of data is available from the FCC’s Broadband Data Collection program. The previous round of data represented networks’ mobile coverage circa December 2022. The new data reflects networks’ status as of June 2023.

In the coming weeks, I’ll share a new version of Coverage Critic’s maps incorporating the latest data and a handful of other upgrades.

U Turn Road Sign

T-Mobile Continues To Walk Back On Forced Plan Migrations

Christian Leave a comment

In T-Mobile’s earnings call earlier today, CEO Mike Sievert reiterated that the company is walking away from forced plan migrations and associated price increases.

By the way, that was sort of not very accurately reported. So let me just kind of clear it up…we tend to do tests and pilots of things quite a bit to try to figure out what’s the right answer. In this case, we had a test cell to try to understand customer interest in and acceptance of migrating off old legacy rate plans to something that’s higher value for them and for us. And we had planned to test and did some training around that. And then it leaked. And it leaked as if it was a broad national thing, and it kind of wasn’t.

Now I don’t know that we still have to do that test cell because, to your point, we did get plenty of feedback thanks to the erroneous context of the leak. And I think we’ve learned that particular test cell isn’t something that our customers are going to love.

Now exactly none have rolled out. So even to your question that we recently rolled out, we didn’t. We had planned it. We had planned it as a test cell and then we aren’t doing it because I think we’ve got plenty of feedback.

Every company has bad ideas. T-Mobile put a stop to this bad idea before it adversely affected customers. Maybe that says something positive about T-Mobile. On the other hand, the suggestion that this was just a small test is frustratingly evasive.

A test was only going to take place because T-Mobile considered making forced plan migrations “a broad national thing.”

Other Changes To Legacy Plans

Sievert later hinted that T-Mobile is still considering eventual adjustments to legacy plans:

We remain very interested in rationalizing our legacy rate plans for IT purposes, simplification purposes, revenue realization purposes, customer satisfaction and retention purposes. So we’re going to stay at it. But that particular idea is — we’ll probably do something different. Good. Okay.
That use of “rationalizing” confused me. Apparently, there’s a business meaning of the term that’s something like “adjusting products and reorganizing things to increase efficiency”.

If T-Mobile moves forward with changes to legacy plans, I hope they’ll go about it a bit more honestly.

Image of a finger pointing at a frowning face

T-Mobile’s Price Increase Saga

Christian Leave a comment

Earlier this month, a now-deleted post on Reddit and an article from The Mobile Report broke a story about an impending price increase for T-Mobile customers. Leaked documents suggested that T-Mobile would switch some customers on older plans to different plans with monthly prices $5 to $10 higher. Customers would be alerted of the upcoming changes and given an option to opt out of the automatic migration.

The documents included suggested lines for T-Mobile representatives fielding calls from customers. The lines include a gem that’s emblematic of the sort of bullshit consumers have to deal with in the cell phone industry:

We are not raising the price of any of our plans; we are moving you to a newer plan with more benefits at a different cost.

Raising prices of certain plans would violate a promise T-Mobile made not to raise prices for existing customers. T-Mobile appears to be weaseling out of its commitment by switching customers’ plans.

Most Customers Are Unaffected

Initially, it sounded like the automatic migrations would affect customers on the following plans:

  • Magenta
  • One
  • Magenta 55+
  • Simple Choice / Select Choice
  • Simple Choice Business

I’d guess tens of millions of customers are on those plans. However, documents released later suggested only 1% of T-Mobile’s customer base, about a million people, would be affected.

The leaks generated pushback and confusion. T-Mobile’s CEO, Mike Sievert, sent a company-wide email clarifying the situation. Sievert explained that reporting around the leaks missed context. Allegedly, price increases and plan switches were part of a small test. The email made me more sympathetic to T-Mobile, but it still reeked of bullshit. It didn’t acknowledge that the changes are, in practice, a price increase.

We hope our customers will be thrilled with the new benefits and service they will eventually receive…We continue to remain committed to being the Un-carrier.

Did T-Mobile Walk Back?

I’m unsure what to make of the whole saga. Maybe a price increase for a tiny segment of T-Mobile’s customers got blown out of proportion. Or perhaps T-Mobile planned to rollout the price increase more broadly but backed off after bad press. It’s hard to say. T-Mobile may scale up the plan migrations to a much larger portion of its customer base.

Image of a traffic jam on one side of a highway

Don’t Hide Throttling!

Christian Leave a comment

Cell phone carriers regularly impose limits to reign in heavy data users. A carrier may throttle a user’s data, deprioritize a user’s data, or both.

Throttling limits a user to a specific maximum speed (e.g., 256kbps). Deprioritizing lowers the priority of a user’s data transfer relative to other users on a network. If a network is not congested, lower priority has no effect. When a network is overburdened, deprioritized users experience slower speeds than other users on the network.

Carriers sometimes disclose their policies with statements along the lines of:

After [X]GB of data use in a single month, users may experience lower speeds.”
The disclosure is vague, but it’s an accurate description of deprioritization. It’s not a good description of throttling. If users are throttled, they will almost certainly experience lower speeds.

Boost Infinite’s Throttle

Boost Infinite throttles heavy users on its unlimited plans to 512kbps. Here’s the disclosure on the homepage:
Screenshot reading: "Members using >30GB/mo. may experience lower speeds."Boost Infinite is not the only carrier that has used language that describes deprioritization when it ought to be disclosing throttling. I’m partly picking on Boost Infinite because it’s the most recent example I’ve encountered. But Boost Infinite further frustrated me while communicating about its policy on Twitter X.

The most bothersome message from the Boost Infinite account has since been deleted. Here’s roughly how I remember it:

Boost Infinite subscribers can use unlimited data.

I like to think of it like traffic. You can travel however far you want on the highway, but if there are lots of other people, it will take a bit longer to get to your destination.

Maybe there’s an analogy to be made between prioritization on cell networks and traffic during a long journey. If you have bad traffic on the road, parts of your journey will be at roughly half the usual speed, some moments you’ll be able to drive at normal speeds, and at times you’ll be caught bumper-to-bumper in traffic jams.

Throttling is different. If your car is forced to stay under 1 mile per hour, there’s an explicit upper bound on how far you can travel in a month. You’re probably not going to bother with a trip from New York City to San Francisco.

An Exception?

While writing this post, Joe Paonessa of BestMVNO.com alerted me to reports of Boost Infinite subscribers not being throttled when accessing Dish’s network.

Boost Infinite’s service almost always piggybacks on AT&T or T-Mobile’s network. However, Boost is owned by Dish. A fraction of customers using certain devices and living in particular markets can sometimes access Dish’s nascent network.

Across Boost Infinite’s customer base, I expect subscribers are connected to Dish’s network less than 1% of the time. However, there’s technically a possibility of avoiding throttling. Perhaps that makes Boost Infinite’s “may reduce speeds” language more defensible.

But we shouldn’t have ended up in this scenario in the first place. Carriers ought to clearly disclose their throttling and congestion-management policies. Consumers should be able to make sense of their cell phone plans’ policies without connecting the dots between random Reddit posts, reports on Twitter, and posts like this one.

Image of an arrow going upwards

Throttling That Doesn’t Suck

Christian Leave a comment

Years ago, some cell carriers introduced “soft caps” for data. Subscribers that used their allotted data could continue accessing the internet at a vastly reduced speed of 128kbps.

In some cases, this was a nice perk. A subscriber to Mint Mobile’s old 3GB plan who had run out of data might still be able to load an important email or boarding pass. In other cases, the reduced-speed data was part of a marketing gimmick. A carrier might offer a soft-capped 15GB plan and market it as an unlimited plan.

At 128kbps, things don’t only load slowly. In many cases, things stop working. Video may not stream. Websites may time out.

Softer Caps

Recently, a handful of carriers started offering soft-capped plans with less aggressive throttles. There are at least five carriers throttling download speeds to 1Mbps or higher:1

  • Xfinity – 1.5Mbps
  • Cox – 1.5Mbps
  • AT&T Prepaid – 1.5Mbps
  • Spectrum – 1Mbps
  • US Mobile – 1Mbps

Props to these carriers. At 1Mbps, you can stream music, browse the internet, and use most apps normally. High-quality video streaming might not work, but almost everything else will.

With the less aggressive throttling, labeling plans unlimited is perhaps a generous framing, but it’s no longer outright bullshit.

Throttled But Prioritized

Ahmed Khattak, CEO of US Mobile, shared the following in a Reddit post (emphasis mine):

We’re also setting the throttle speed of all our Unlimited Plans to 1Mbps after the high-speed data allotment is used. Unless you’re streaming 4K Video, I’m unsure if you will notice any difference if you are throttled. You will also remain on priority data even with throttled speeds.

Network congestion is a common source of the sub-1Mbps speeds that cause lousy user experiences. With priority data, throttled users have some protection from congestion troubles.

I hope we see high-priority data post-throttling become a more common feature.2 Subscribers don’t use a ton of data after getting throttled. MVNOs that pay a per-gig premium for priority data may be able to offer the feature without meaningfully changing their cost structures.

Crowdsourcing Coverage Data

Christian Leave a comment

Vehicles with DIMO hardware are driving millions of miles per week and contributing anonymized data to Coverage Critic’s interactive crowdsourced map. Here’s how the new map presents T-Mobile’s coverage around New York City.

Coverage map image showing New York City mostly in green (indicating a strong signal)

Green shading indicates strong signals. As the signals weaken, the shading morphs to yellow and eventually red.

While the map is less filled in remote areas, it’s potentially more interesting. In the heart of the mountain town of Leadville, Colorado, the map shows good coverage from AT&T. Following the highway out of town to the north, signal quality quickly deteriorates.

Map of Leadville showing green (indicating a strong signal) in the center of the town and red (indicating a weak signal) north of the town

Today’s map is built on almost 20 million data points. With over a million more observations coming in each day, the map will grow more complete.

Map users can drill down into the underlying data after selecting a specific region:

Screenshot showing details about the data underlying one of the hexes within the coverage map.

More powerful tools for exploring and visualizing the data are coming soon.

Approaches To Network Testing

There are two standard approaches for assessing cell networks:

  • Drive Testing: Evaluators drive around with several phones on different networks while running tests to assess cellular performance.
  • Conventional Crowdsourcing: Code running in the background of various apps on ordinary consumers’ phones collects data about cell networks.

Pros & Cons

Drive testing is well-controlled. Evaluators use the same device on every network and have detailed information on exactly what’s going on. On the other hand, drive tests assess a limited area and may not reflect real-world usage. RootMetrics, the company behind what is arguably the most respected drive test, covers only a few hundred thousand miles each year.

Conventional crowdsourcing allows for the collection of far more data. However, the data is harder to interpret. Crowdsourced data comes from numerous different devices. It’s often unclear whether a given data point comes from a phone that’s indoors or outdoors. Since consumer aren’t randomly assigned their devices or networks, bias infiltrates assessments.1

Coverage Critic’s New Approach

Coverage Critic’s approach is a hybrid of the two standard approaches to network testing. Like drive tests, Coverage Critic collects data in a relatively well-controlled manner, relying on in-vehicle data from a tightly constrained set of devices. Since data is crowdsourced from thousands of vehicles, more miles are covered in a week than some conventional drive testers cover in a year.2

Enabled By DIMO

Mozilla recently published a bombshell report titled It’s Official: Cars Are the Worst Product Category We Have Ever Reviewed for Privacy. The report details (1) how much data modern vehicles collect and (2) car companies’ tendency to reserve the right to sell that data.

DIMO is reimagining how vehicle data is collected and used, allowing consumers to share in the value of their vehicles’ data while offering more transparency and control over its use.

Thousands of cars driving tens of millions of miles annually are equipped with DIMO hardware and contributing anonymized data to the new map. When Coverage Critic pays DIMO for data, a share of the payments goes towards rewards for the DIMO community. To everyone participating in the project, I’d like to offer my thanks! If you’d like to join the DIMO Network, you can head here to pick up a device.

The Road Ahead

For the moment, Coverage Critic will offer a coverage map relying on RF modeling data submitted to the FCC’s BDC program and an alternate map based on on-the-ground, crowdsourced data. Eventually, I plan to merge both data sources into a single map.

With an appropriate statistical model, the two data sources can aid one another. Information collected on the ground can be used to forecast the accuracy of networks’ RF models in other locations. Predictions from RF models can inform how likely crowdsourced data is to reflect the typical experience in a given area. In a few months, I’ll have much more to say on this topic.

Go ahead and explore the map or check out DIMO. If you have any feedback, please let me know.

Animated image showing Coverage Critic's crowdsouced map in Los Angeles

Helium Mobile’s $5 Unlimited Plan

Christian Leave a comment

Helium Mobile is coming out of beta and offering an unlimited plan for $5 per month.1 It’s arguably the cheapest unlimited plan on the US market. But the price is kind of contrived.

Helium Mobile’s Networks

First some background details. Helium Mobile is an MVNO running over T-Mobile’s network. However, the carrier has a novel differentiator. It supplements T-Mobile’s coverage with coverage from Helium’s network of CBRS radios.

The Helium network has roughly 10,000 CBRS radios scattered throughout the country. I won’t get into the weeds here, but Helium got normal people to set up these radios by incentivizing them with the project’s cryptocurrency tokens.

The radios making up Helium’s network are weak and usually poorly located. Helium hasn’t (yet) figured out mechanisms to adequately incentivize good placements. While I don’t know how much area Helium’s network covers, I’m confident it’s far less than 1% of the US by land area.

Currently, Helium Mobile is only accepting signups from people in Miami.2 Helium may be able to build a denser network in Miami than it has in the wider US. But for now, Helium’s coverage footprint within Miami is tiny compared to T-Mobile’s footprint in the city. That will remain true for the foreseeable future.3

How Is Helium Mobile So Cheap?

Nova Labs, the company behind Helium Mobile, raised a ton of money from crypto-adjacent venture capital firms. The $5 price is only possible through subsidization.

It’s normal for new MVNOs to start with prices slightly below their costs while betting that the cost per subscriber will fall after hitting economies of scale.

Helium Mobile is making a bolder bet. At $5 per month, Helium Mobile is taking a huge loss on each subscriber. Helium Mobile is betting on the regular economies of scale while also hoping for a second shift in its underlying cost structure.

While I don’t know the actual numbers, Helium Mobile probably pays a few bucks for each gigabyte of data on T-Mobile’s network. On the Helium network, data comes in at $0.50 per gigabyte. If Helium Mobile gets enough data flowing over Helium’s network, it could achieve a better cost structure than other MVNOs.

Could the cost structure become so good that Nova Labs actually turns a profit on a $5 per month unlimited plan? No. I don’t think that’s Nova Labs’ ultimate goal, though.

A Real-World Crypto Use Case?

Nova Labs’ COO shared this post on Twitter yesterday:

In my view, the “real world crypto use case” point is aspirational. Or perhaps it has been realized but in a convoluted way. Crypto allowed Nova Labs to raise a bunch of funding. That funding is subsidizing what is, for the moment, a largely conventional cellular service.

Integration Woes

Conventional roaming allows a phone to switch networks when it enters an area where the usual network lacks coverage. I expect Helium wanted to offer something better: seamless coverage with phones intelligently switching between multiple networks serving the same location.

Dynamic network switching of that sort is a technical challenge. It probably takes a lot of buy-in from the networks involved. As far as I can tell, Helium couldn’t pull off this kind of integration with T-Mobile.

For now, Helium Mobile relies on a less streamlined approach. Subscribers must use multiple SIM cards for their service. According to anecdotal reports, handoffs between T-Mobile’s network and Helium’s radios are clunky. For technical and regulatory reasons, Helium’s radios only support data traffic. T-Mobile handles texts and calls.

Scaling Challenges

A $5 price point may attract a lot of customers. More customers means a larger volume of customer support queries. Initially limiting service to Miami may ease the burden of support queries, but I expect Helium Mobile will have to either prioritize building a massive customer support team or settle for a lousy standard.

The Bright Side

While performance issues and integration difficulties plague Helium’s cellular network, there are tractable paths forward. Helium Mobile’s ridiculously low price point may make subscribers more tolerant of bumps in the road as Helium Mobile fine-tunes its service.

Recently, Nova Labs has been teasing an upcoming WiFi product. It’s too soon to say anything confidently, but the product may allow the Helium community to sidestep many of the regulatory and technical challenges cellular presents.

The People’s Network?

Nova Labs’ CEO shared a nice sentiment in a recent blog post:

For most of history, technology has been held tightly in the grasp of the few — from monarchies and aristocracies to corporations and billionaires. The internet, despite its ability to create instant and open communication with each other, is no exception: it came at a price that many cannot afford.

We believe technology — especially the internet — should be the inheritance of the whole human race. We are all its heirs, and access should be in the hands of the people.

There’s a history of telecom companies talking a big game about connecting the unconnected and other pro-social goals while ruthlessly pursuing profits and screwing consumers. Something similar could be said about much of the cryptocurrency ecosystem. Will Helium buck the trends and lean into its high-minded ambitions?