OpenSignal replies to Verizon’s statement about OpenSignal's report

Edit: Full statement attached below

This is the third post of a trilogy, if you aren’t sure of what’s going on with Verizon and Open Signal, let’s briefly recap: On Wednesday, OpenSignal released a report that used raw data from its crowd-sourced speed tests to compare actual performance. The resulting report had Verizon and T-Mobile in a tie.

The next day (Thursday), Verizon tweeted a response to OpenSignal’s report and pretty much tried to dismiss their findings based on the methodology of crowd-sourced data, claiming that crowd-sourced data is not as good as “drive-testing” (riding around which does “a better job of reflecting the actual customer experience.” See Verizon's statement:

pic.twitter.com/qNaZqfk9jq

— Verizon News (@VerizonNews) February 9, 2017

Yesterday, (Friday) we’ve received a new statement from OpenSignal about the claims that Verizon made in response to OpenSignal’s original report from two days ago. Here is what OpenSignal had to say about Verizon’s response:

If you want to understand what people experience on mobile networks, would you trust a simulation from a few devices stuffed into a briefcase driven on a few roads to approximate experience, or would you trust billions of real-world measurements from real-world users[?] We invite you all to say goodbye to the legacy world of drive-testing and welcome the here and now – real-world experience from OpenSignal.

One notable response was to Verizon’s claim that “the inability to perform a test is not counted against the results” to which OpenSignal says: “This is plain false as we can always measure when user is caught without signal and we take this into account in our metrics… The network itself can track when users have a poor signal but are still connected, but when you are completely off-grid, the only way you can track this is by measuring on the device.”

OpenSignal’s original intention was not to undermine Verizon’s previous scores, but given the statement it tweeted, Verizon didn’t seem to be impressed with the results that OpenSignal released.

Can you be mad at OpenSignal for releasing a report that used a different set of data than the reports that Verizon frequently cites? Perhaps, yes, if you are aiming for a national high-score, but regional results may be more important to customers who want a way to see how well the network performed among others in a local area.

Full Statement from OpenSignal