2G/3G network measurements in rural areas of India

Abstract

Recent years have seen rapid cellular expansion in urban and rural India [1], providing an avenue to bridge the digital divide. However there is little understanding of the performance of cellular data connectivity in different geographies. We take a first step towards this. We are planning to characterize the performance of cellular data networks available across different locations, rural and urban, in India through a large scale experimental setup consisting of more than 50 measurement points across the country. We hope our findings will reveal capacity provisioning and network design characteristics that telecom operators follow in deploying 2G/3G connectivity in different areas.