Viewpoint

Nothing gets in the way of a better network. Updated every six weeks, the OS 5m Grid Clutter Model gives radio planners the most accurate view of Great Britain

All Communications Service Providers (CSPs) face challenges in delivering the best possible service for their customers – and the goalposts are constantly changing. With customer churn running as high as 22% due to service issues and increasing demand being placed on networks to deliver higher bandwidth and lower latency in the drive towards a 5G world, the pressure on network planners has never been greater. 

Added to this, a recent review of how the market is served in Great Britain highlighted significant concerns regarding the accuracy and currency of some of the data being used by network planners to identify physical obstructions to phone signals, predict signal strength or project data traffic usage and trends. 

Much of this data is derived from satellite imagery where the feature extraction process can present challenges around accuracy due to the way the data is captured and presented. 

Ordnance Survey, Great Britain’s national mapping agency, uses a field force of over 250 surveyors and 2 aircraft to capture an exact geospatial database of Britain right down to centimetre level accuracy and processes over 20,000 changes to this database every day. 

We can then publish these changes as often as every six weeks on a national, regional or local scale. 

This paper shows how the Ordnance Survey Network Planning Suite can provide CSPs with the most accurate understanding of these changes to the natural and built environments and help deliver a significant competitive advantage to their network.

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