The Sixth Round of Mobile Testing will begin at the end of September

The sixth round of the CPUC's mobile testing program will start at the end of September and will continue over the next six weeks, finishing before Thanksgiving and winter snow. Like rounds four and five, the project will test 1,990 points up and down the state, rather than the 1,200 points which were tested in the first three rounds of testing. Like the previous rounds, the sixth round will test speed and latency for four providers; T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon and AT&T. We will test each provider by both netbook and phone. It is good thing that Sprint dropped its bid to purchase T-Mobile, then we would only have three providers to test. The first five rounds have shown marked improvement by all the providers. Will the sixth round continue this trend? We shall see.

CPUC's New Way of Measuring Mobile Performance Shrinks Providers' Coverage on Tribal Lands from 80 percent to 20 percent

While previously the CPUC relied on mobile providers' coverage claims, which resulted in 80% of California's native population having served mobile broadband coverage, the new method based on our mobile speed testing program minus one standard deviation, to account for mobile broadband's inherent unreliability, now shows only 23 percent of the population covered by 6 Mbps down and 1.5 Mbps up. These results raise questions about whether tribes, who do not have wireline broadband service, can use mobile broadband as a substitute.

Thank You California; CalSPEED users run 6,000 Tests

The tests from the CPUC's CalSPEED mobile app for testing broadband speeds keep rolling in. Including last week's results, users have run 6,000 tests on this android phones app and those test results are being used to feed the CalSPEED layer on the California Interactive Broadband Map. We have encouraged California Advanced Services Fund applicants to run the app to see if their community is served by mobile broadband. The app is free to download and is available at Google Play. We encourage California residents to download the app today and start testing in your community.

The points on the above map show exactly where CalSPEED has been tested. The legend below indicates the type of speed each colored dot represents.