TL;DR:

NetRadar-India is a crowdsourced user study, to analyze the technology dependent deficiencies in the mobile network infrastructure. To know more about how to participate, please visit our website.

About:

Internet connectivity around the world is far from uniform, especially when Internet is emerging as one of the fundamental civil rights in developing nations, just like their so-called developed counterparts. In the case of India, a semi-developed (rather than developing) nation, the technology penetration is not uniform across the regions where the disparity is evident in the infrastructure, cost of access and telecom services to provide Internet facilities among different economic classes. To gauge where we stand in leaderboards of emerging technologies, it is very crucial to analyze the variety of connectivity, and how the technology is evolving. The understanding of global Internet experience and exposure plays a key role when our mission is to ensure that the Internet is for everyone.

The technological evolution heavily influences majority of the world to adapt to the swift changes in commercial standardizations. However, India falls back to fit into such global norms for many things, given its size and complexity, and telecommunication services is one of them. In spite of having one of the largest mobile userbase, Indian mobile Internet networks are still remarkably slower than in the developed countries. Furthermore, fraudulent episodes of 2G spectrum scams, not only questions the ethicality of our democratic government, but also haunts the possible incapability of telecom operators, if any.

In order to asses the state of mobile networks in India and its readiness in adopting and using the latest mobile standards for commercial use we have launched the Netradar-India project - a crowdsourced user study, thereby addressing the technology dependent deficiencies in the mobile network infrastructure. Hailing as an academic research initiative, NetRadar-India is not targeted towards government or telecom operators, but definitely it would create awareness among the common people about the infrastructure behind the services that they are paying for. Additionally, we believe that such an assessment would help to improve feasibility, scalability, security, privacy, robustness, and performance of tomorrow’s mobile network. We are trying to accelerate and scale our research efforts by leveraging cost-effective solutions like crowdsourcing.

Leveraging open and free softwares/standards, and the community’s participation in campaigns against Net Neutrality in recent past has brought a tremendous impact. In the same realm, we expect the community members to join us to propose new solutions/improvements for emerging digital India through this project.

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How to participate in NetRadar-India project?

Participating in this project is as simple as downloading the Netradar App on your mobile phones and following the simple instructions provided here, so that the app can take the relevant measurements. To know more, please visit the project website.

Please start by taking a small survey here before you start taking the measurements using NetRadar app.

For more queries regarding the user study please check out the FAQ page or contact us.

Thanks and regards,

NetRadar-India research team.

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