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White Paper

Building Resilient Connectivity for Public Safety

Safeguard communities with Speedtest, Downdetector, and Ekahau, empowering agencies across all stages of preparedness, response, and recovery.

Reliable communication is the backbone of public safety. From coordinating evacuations to keeping hospitals connected, agencies cannot afford blind spots when uninterrupted connectivity is absolutely critical.

This white paper explores how agencies can strengthen connectivity across all stages of disaster preparedness, emergency response, and community recovery. Drawing on insights from Ookla’s ecosystem, it highlights:

  • Preparedness: Identify coverage gaps, validate upgrades, and secure critical facilities before disaster strikes.
  • Response: Detect outages in real time and maintain situational awareness when every second counts.
  • Recovery: Track restoration progress, justify funding, and guide future network investments.

With billions of daily Speedtest samples, real-time Downdetector insights, and Ekahau’s in-building expertise, agencies gain the visibility and reliability needed to protect communities.

Download the full white paper to learn how your organization can build resilient connectivity for public safety.

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White Paper

Unlocking RAN Potential: A Guide to Network Planning and Optimization

Weak coverage and network congestion are two of the fastest ways to lose customers.

Reliable coverage and consistent network performance are the foundation of customer satisfaction. But operators face mounting challenges from weak coverage zones, network congestion, complex 5G rollouts, and aggressive competition. Without visibility into how networks perform in the real world, those challenges can quickly translate into churn.

This guide explores proven strategies for RAN planning and optimization, including:

  • Pinpointing and addressing weak coverage areas
  • Managing congestion and capacity at peak times
  • Identifying optimal locations for new cell sites
  • Benchmarking against competitors to validate leadership

Download the guide and learn how Speedtest Insights helps operators tackle RAN challenges with data-driven precision.

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White Paper

The Cost of Downtime: A Guide to Proactive Outage Management

Every minute of downtime doesn't just cost money—it erodes the customer trust that companies spend years building.

When services like websites, apps, and digital platforms experience outages, the consequences extend far beyond frustrated users. Service outages cost businesses billions of dollars every year in lost revenue. When major streaming platforms crash during peak hours, companies face immediate customer backlash and media scrutiny. When social media networks go dark, small businesses that depend on these platforms for sales can lose thousands of dollars in a matter of hours. These aren’t isolated incidents—they represent a $400 billion problem that grows worse each year.

This white paper provides best practices for proactive outage management, including:

  • Developing a proactive response plan
  • Utilizing crowdsourced data to identify issues fast
  • How Downdetector helps companies track, prevent, and resolve outages

Download the white paper and discover proven strategies to improve your service incident detection and resolution.

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White Paper

Improving Campus Wi-Fi Connectivity

Solving complex wireless challenges across education with real-world design, validation, and optimization strategies

From K–12 schools to large universities, educators face growing pressure to deliver seamless connectivity everywhere students learn. As devices and digital tools multiply, so do the challenges of supporting strong, dependable Wi‑Fi across diverse, high-density learning environments.

This white paper walks through the top challenges facing campus networks and offers practical ways to design, validate, and optimize connectivity across education environments:

  • Improve Wi‑Fi in high-density areas and support a wide range of devices
  • Use Ekahau to design, validate, and troubleshoot effectively
  • Solve connectivity issues across diverse campus environments

Download the white paper and discover proven strategies to improve performance across your entire campus.

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White Paper

How APC Towers Uses Ookla Data for Data-Driven Site Selection

Using crowdsourced network performance and coverage data to highlight underserved markets and leasing opportunities

With the rise in U.S. telecom projects and hundreds of thousands of new tower deployments each year, effective site selection is crucial. Each project has unique requirements, demanding careful evaluation of sites, surroundings, and regulations. As networks densify for 5G, a robust, scalable evaluation process becomes essential. 

APC Towers, a U.S. based tower developer specializing in building and acquiring tower sites, leverages cutting-edge tools to stay ahead in this dynamic landscape. In this white paper, discover how APC Towers uses Ookla data to address key use cases, including:

  • Strategically selecting areas with low coverage to build new towers 
  • Adding antennas to existing towers to serve additional MNOs
  • Showcasing competitive advantages and highlighting underserved markets
  • Leveraging visualization for targeted marketing and offering custom solutions for MNOs
  • Strengthening tenant trust through transparent tower data and actionable insights

 

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White Paper

Dublin City Council’s Data-Driven Model for Urban Connectivity

A practical blueprint for European cities to enhance connectivity and tackle the digital divide

This white paper, a unique collaboration between Dublin City Council, Ookla, and the City Telecoms Association, presents a data-driven model to improve urban connectivity. By identifying connectivity gaps, optimizing city-owned assets for telecoms infrastructure, and promoting digital inclusion, it offers a blueprint for enhancing decision-making and telecoms strategies across European cities.

Using Ookla’s Speedtest Insights™, Dublin City Council accessed unprecedented, granular data on local telecoms performance, creating Ireland’s largest city-level telecoms analysis and setting a new European standard for data-driven urban telecoms planning.

Download the white paper to explore Dublin’s approach to transforming urban connectivity with data-driven insights, including the following key outcomes:

  • Established KPIs to monitor Dublin’s telecoms competitiveness and support future planning to ‘telecoms-proof’ capital investments
  • Used geospatial analysis and computer vision to Identify connectivity gaps
  • Examined how to better leverage city-owned assets including rooftops for telecoms deployments
  • Promoted citizen engagement and providing educational resources to demystify telecoms infrastructure, fostering public support 
  • Studying how to improve digital inclusion by overlaying crowdsourced network performance data with socio-economic indicators 

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White Paper

Smartphone User Trends: Consumer Insights from the U.K. and U.S.

Understanding consumer user behaviors and preferences in the evolving connectivity landscape

Smartphones play an increasingly vital role in our daily lives. For industry players, understanding user behaviors, trends, and preferences is crucial in shaping enterprise strategies and offerings. Ookla commissioned a comprehensive study, surveying over 2,000 primarily smartphone users across the U.K. and U.S., to gain valuable insights on consumer usage patterns, satisfaction levels, and pain points.

In this white paper, you will learn:

  • How users leverage both Wi-Fi and cellular data in the 5G era
  • Common pain points and frustrations experienced by smartphone users
  • The critical impact of network outages on user satisfaction and loyalty
  • Diverging viewpoints on new connectivity options in the U.S. market

Download the white paper to access all of the survey questions and results, including:

  • Wi-Fi remains crucial alongside widespread cellular data usage, with 71% of respondents using both evenly.
  • 5G adoption signals a growing appetite for new technologies, with 72% of respondents using 5G-enabled smartphones.
  • Network outages are a significant concern, affecting 27% of U.K. respondents and 14% of U.S. respondents at least once a month.

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White Paper

How to Increase Customer Lifetime Value with Crowdsourced Service Disruption Management Solutions

Improving customer satisfaction and reducing churn for communications service providers

The growing demand for reliable connectivity presents a challenge for communication service providers to maintain customer satisfaction and to drive revenue. Crowdsourced Service Disruption Management (SDM) solutions help address these issues by leveraging the collective view of customers to identify network, application, or device-related issues in real-time. 

Integrating SDM with existing network management systems enhances service assurance, improves customer satisfaction, and reduces churn through proactive issue monitoring and faster issue resolution. Additionally, AI and ML technologies can further enhance SDM capabilities, driving operational efficiencies and supporting customer lifecycle management.

In this white paper you will learn:

  • How crowdsourced SDM solutions can help service providers maximize Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
  • How crowdsourced SDM solutions can support the different stages of Customer Lifecycle Management (CLM)
  • How SDM solutions can help service providers maintain transparent communication with customers during service disruptions to build trust and loyalty
  • How real-world operators have used Ookla’s SDM solutions, Downdetector Explorer and Downdetector Connect, to improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn

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White Paper

How Regulators Can Drive Digital Transformation and Competition with Crowdsourced Network Insights

Using real-world data to understand and improve connectivity for the public

Every country faces unique challenges when trying to deliver reliable connectivity to its constituents. Telecommunications regulators are tasked with driving digital transformation while addressing geographic, economic, and industry constraints. Drawn from billions of daily mobile network samples, Ookla® crowdsourced data provides a robust, comprehensive picture of connectivity that empowers regulators to make data-driven policy decisions and tangible improvements, then monitor the results of these efforts.

In this white paper, you’ll learn how regulators are using crowdsourced connectivity data to:

  • Identify areas where people can’t access the connectivity they need
  • Ensure public safety along transportation corridors and in remote areas
  • Monitor compliance and the performance of new network and technology deployments
  • Understand spectrum usage, user density, and consumer demand
  • Identify overlapping network signals from beyond national borders
  • Inform policy decisions around infrastructure, spectrum, service quality mandates, and more

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White Paper

5G City Benchmark Report 2022

An analysis of 5G performance and 5G Availability in major cities worldwide during Q3-Q4 2022

With lightning-fast network speeds and ultra-low latency, 5G has ushered in not only a new era of improved network performance, but also enabled new connected experiences for users. To support these next-generation capabilities, it’s imperative for mobile operators to ensure widely available, consistently high-performing 5G network deployments. Our city-level analysis explores which markets and operators are pushing the boundaries of 5G network performance — and where 5G throughput and coverage are falling behind.

In this white paper, you’ll find:

  • 5G download speed, 5G upload speed, and 5G Availability for 40 major cities 
  • Top mobile network operator 5G performance and 5G Availability within 10 select cities
  • Trends for 5G launches and rollouts in various regions of the world 
  • Analysis of the 5G performance versus availability trade-off 

Please note: This analysis is not based on an exhaustive list of all cities with 5G, but a representative sampling from around the globe. 

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