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

2025-07-24

AI Summary

In the 5G era, mobile network performance exhibits significant heterogeneity, with users commonly experiencing high latency, low throughput, and unstable connectivity—necessitating independent, cross-carrier evaluation. Method: This study presents the first large-scale, third-party assessment of mobile network performance—latency, throughput, and connection stability—based on real-world traffic data collected globally from a distributed commercial CDN infrastructure. We integrate statistical analysis with spatiotemporal modeling to characterize geographic and carrier-specific performance variations. Contribution/Results: We find that minimum latency is highly location-stable (enabling robust anomaly detection); only 5% of users consistently achieve sub-20 ms latency, while 60% experience throughput below 50 Mb/s; the best observed latency reaches as low as 6 ms. These findings establish a novel empirical paradigm and benchmark for objective, operator-agnostic mobile network quality evaluation.

Technology Category

• Search and Optimization: Evaluation and Analysis
• Machine Learning: Evaluation and Analysis
• Application Domains: Mobility, Driving & Flight

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metrics
• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements

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.

Problem

• Assess mobile performance in 5G for latency and throughput
• Evaluate stability of mobile networks using CDN data
• Analyze global carrier-agnostic mobile user experience

Innovation

• Uses globally-distributed CDN for neutral assessment
• Measures latency, throughput, and stability metrics
• Analyzes mobile performance across international providers