Today, Ookla, a global leader in connectivity intelligence, announces its partnership with Dublin City Council and the City Telecoms Association to identify and tackle telecoms deficits in Dublin. This first-of-its-kind initiative, fueled by Ookla’s Speedtest Insights®, offers a practical blueprint for l cities across Europe to drive digital inclusion and optimise network outcomes through actionable, data-driven insights.
The partnership demonstrates how a data-driven approach can enhance connectivity outcomes in a tangible way, empowering cities to better serve citizens. For the first time, the city is addressing connectivity gaps through targeted policy interventions, and fostering collaborative efforts with operators to attract investments that were previously hindered by site acquisition challenges.
You can find the full partnership case study here with more information about the five high-impact use cases created by Dublin City Council using Ookla’s network intelligence data.
Key points from the study:
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Telecoms strategy and digital inclusion: A proactive data-driven telecom strategy aimed at bridging digital divides, with significant analysis of how socio-economic factors affect connectivity outcomes, especially in areas with high social deprivation.
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Identification of connectivity gaps: Ookla’s real-world data has enabled DCC to pinpoint key areas in Dublin with significant connectivity issues, influencing policy and planning to prioritise interventions where they are most needed.
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Innovative use of city assets: Dublin’s approach to leveraging city-owned assets for telecom infrastructure, including facilitating multi-operator site access, represents a strategic move to optimise asset use and reduce urban clutter, aligned with EU regulatory goals.
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Transparency and public engagement: The Council has launched a public educational initiative on telecom infrastructure, including visualisations of before-and-after network improvements from new site deployments, to engage citizens and increase acceptance of new infrastructure.
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Comparative benchmarking in Europe: Through Ookla’s data, Dublin has gained insights into its telecom performance relative to other European cities, highlighting areas of competitive strength in 5G availability and identifying room for improvement in 4G speeds.
Key data and methodology:
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The collaboration saw Ookla collect Speedtest® network data across the city over two 12-month periods (June 2022-June 2023 and June 2023-June 2024) with a sample size in the tens of millions; creating the most comprehensive analysis of mobile network performance ever conducted at the city level in Ireland.
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Leveraging Ookla’s Speedtest® Insights platform, DCC were able to integrate other data sources, such as internal city asset registries, mobile site location maps from Ireland’s telecoms regulator ComReg, and social deprivation data from Pobal.
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Geospatial analysis created a localised tile-based grid across the entire city to categorise mobile network performance at different times of the day. Performance was evaluated against two metrics; signal strength and download speed. Each location tile was categorised as unacceptable if it had less than 11 dBm signal strength and 5 Mbps download speed. Anything above 11 dBM and 5 Mbps was categorised as ‘acceptable’.