Being now domesticated in Damansara, of Selangor, Malaysia and in particular the areas shown in the map above, I have always felt that the quality of GSM/Telco coverage is erratic, to say kindly.
One of the few reasons for the suboptimal GSM coverage quality in my abode, Mutiara Damansara is perhaps due to the rate of development encroached onto that patch of land over the last decade. Who would have thought that this area that once home to orang-asli (aborigines) is now being sought after by developers. Within the past 10 years, it saw the construction on now popular landmarks, namely Ikea, Ikano Power Center, and The Curve. Adjacent to Mutiara Damansara would be the Damansara Perdana. Not to be secondary to Mutiara Damansara, it also boasts Empire Damansara that comes with few tall erections and yet few more in the making. This is one serious money pit for developers.
The developments saw a drastic increase in population density. The areas that were not populated before are now burgeoning with people from all walks of life. The location of Mutiara Damansara, Damansara Perdana and Penchala doesnt help either. They lie right next to a few 100-200 meter hills which create signal pockets ie areas with unreachable GSM network.
Getting the most accurate street level GSM level read out
We have long envisioned that the massive amount of data collected by KATSANA can be extremely powerful when it is massaged (ie processed, and made to be understandable) properly. Part of the raw pings (ie signal) sent to our servers each day contains information that has no immediate benefit to the actual user. Some of the parameters are temperature, satellite numbers, GSM level, and also the id of GSM towers.
Note: This is an interactive map. Do play around with it.
This seemingly unnecessary data however, once collected across thousands of users each day all year long, can provide us with a pretty granular, in-depth understanding of the matter at hand. In this case, the quality of GSM levels in a certain neighbourhood, district, or even the entire Malaysia.
For this exercise, we collect around 40,000 location data that was sent to KATSANA servers (almost 1% of processed data per day), clean up unrelated parameters from each row of data, and plot the level of GSM against coordinates on the map.
The cleaned row of data will provide us with the GSM level that ranges from:
- 0 – No reception at all, colored in gray
- 1 – Bad reception, colored in white
- 2 – Slightly better reception
- 3 – Somewhat good reception, colored in pink
- 4 – Good reception
- 5 – Best reception, dark red
The plotted coordinates end up being like the above, covering most of Klang Valley.
Lets focus by zooming into Mutiara Damansara and its vicinity.
The circle marks Empire Damansara
A horrible GSM coverage in Empire Damansara
Notice how most of the data that we receive from Empire Damansara are either marked as 0, or 1? That is the actual reception quality faced by the residents there.
Lets get deeper and see how bad the network is in that vicinity.
All the white and gray dots above mark the exact location with either zero GSM network, or barely visible network.
And lets overlay the map on a satellite view of Empire Damansara.
The precision of each point is due to our dual support for GPS (USA satellites) and GLONASS (Russian satellites). On top of that, KATSANA retrieves the vehicle’s location every 10 seconds, providing a very detail, live location update for all our customers.
Bigger plans in the future
What you have seen is a sneak preview of what we intent to achieve in the future. The data shown in this example is just 1% of what we are collecting and processing each day. It will grow to be much larger, thus providing us with utmost detail of street level environment.
We hope that the wealth of data processed by KATSANA can be manifested through big-data applications that can mine this data, and polish them for specific usage and needs. If you have any idea or comment, do send an email to [email protected]
For more information about Katsana, contact our sales representatives +6013-773 3014 or +6013-773 3154 to arrange for a demonstration.