Third-Party Assessment of Mobile Performance in the 5G Era

TL;DR

This study assesses mobile performance in the 5G era using CDN data, revealing latency and throughput patterns across users and locations, and highlighting stability and variability in mobile network experience.

Contribution

It provides a carrier-agnostic, global analysis of mobile network performance metrics using CDN data, which is novel compared to prior carrier-specific studies.

Findings

Top 5% users experience latency below 20 ms

Around 60% users observe throughput less than 50 Mb/s

Minimum latency is stable at specific locations

Abstract

The web experience using mobile devices is important since a significant portion of the Internet traffic is initiated from mobile devices. In the era of 5G, users expect a high-performance data network to stream media content and for other latency-sensitive applications. In this paper, we characterize mobile experience in terms of latency, throughput, and stability measured from a commercial, globally-distributed CDN. Unlike prior work, CDN data provides a relatively neutral, carrier-agnostic perspective, providing a clear view of multiple and international providers. Our analysis of mobile client traffic shows mobile users sometimes experience markedly low latency, even as low as 6 ms. However, only the top 5% users regularly experience less than 20 ms of minimum latency. While 100 Mb/s throughput is not rare, we show around 60% users observe less than 50 Mb/s throughput. We find the minimum mobile latency is generally stable at a specific location which can be an important characteristic for anomaly detection.