Characterizing Delays in Norwegian 3G Networks

This paper presents a first look at long-term delay measurements from data connections in 3 Norwegian 3G Networks. We have performed active measurements for more than 6 months from 90 voting locations used in a trial with electronic voting during this fall’s regional elections. Our monitors are geographically spread across all of Norway, and give an unprecedented view of the performance and stability of the total 3G infrastructure of a country. In this paper, we focus on delay characteristics. We find large differences in delay between different monitors. More interestingly, we observe that the delay characteristics of the different operators are very different, pointing to operator-specific network design and configurations as the most important factor for delays.