Our method

What we measure

Every five minutes, the Mobile Money® app sends a small request to four of our servers and times the name lookup, the connection, the secure connection and the arrival of the first response. It also records the outcome: success, timeout or error.

On which phones

On the phones where the Mobile Money® app is installed, over the network they use at the time of the measurement. A dedicated consent arrives with an upcoming version of the app.

The published measures

Success rate: the share of successful requests. Median latency: half of the responses arrive faster. Slow latency: nine responses in ten arrive faster. Secure connection: the median duration of the encrypted handshake. Over a period, each latency is the average of the hourly or daily values, weighted by the number of successful measurements.

Network health

Health = 45% × success rate + 30% × median latency score + 15% × slow latency score + 10% × secure connection score.

Each score is 100 at the good end and 0 at the bad end, in a straight line between them: median latency from 200 ms to 3,000 ms, slow latency from 400 ms to 6,000 ms, secure connection from 100 ms to 1,500 ms.

Never a ranking on a handful of points

An operator is ranked only from 200 measurements over the period. Below that, we write “not enough measurements”. No value is set aside because it looks isolated.

The limits, stated

We do not measure speed yet. Our measurements do not carry a location yet: the map stops at the country. The live ranking counts mobile data only; the daily aggregate behind the 7, 30 and 90-day periods also counts measurements made on Wi-Fi.

What we publish, what we keep

We publish aggregates only: no number, no phone identifier, no location. Raw measurements are kept, because they ground the published figures.

The map

The map is schematic: one square per area, with no third-party base map. Colours follow fixed bands, the same for every area.

Write to us

A question about a figure or the method? Contact us

Checking a figure

Every hourly or daily aggregate is sealed by a SHA-256 fingerprint of its content. The fingerprint of a view is the SHA-256 of the sorted list of its aggregates’ fingerprints. Here are those of the selected view.

Africa · Live · 24 h · From Oct 1, 04:00 to Oct 2, 04:00

Fingerprint of these figures eec20d71c9745315a9612e02217b0cb9140a80b2770b54801c88e9e0eec99d0d Check these figures