Nielson and Carrier IQ have come to some sort of partnership in order to grade the overall quality of mobile services provided by carriers in the United States and worldwide. The partnership will give Nielson the information recorded by Carrier IQ’s software that is actually in over 150 million mobile devices in the world. This will allow Nielson to monitor the performance of phones and then supply carriers with the data found during the user experience. This will also help mobile carriers better understand how their service is being used and rated.
Nielsen is the leader in tracking information and will be doing so with mobile services and their quality in the United States. The company will be tracking information from consumers in the United States by sending out surveys, retail measurements, and opt-in consumer panels and by monitoring devices. Nielsen is currently already tracking information like the number of subscribers and market share for mobile operating systems and customer satisfaction. Nielsen has also been tracking the effectiveness of mobile ads on consumers using devices like iPhone, iPads, and mobile devices.
The main goal of the partnership is to use Nielsen’s consumer panels and Carrier IQ’s device metering platform in order to rank the mobile carriers and provide benchmarks for the voice and date performance. With more customers becoming smartphone owners and more mobile carriers claiming the fastest speeds and best call quality, it is time to see what the mobile carriers really have to offer consumers around the world. Voice services will be metered for things like dropped calls, signal strength and quality. On the data end of the things, the metering will include successful connections and task failures, which should give a pretty good idea of what voice and data networks rank at the top.
Without a real definition of 4G network, the metrics will really be able to see the raw data and then rank the networks where they really stand. Until the definition is made official, all networks are marketing technologies and connection speeds as 4G, but they are all different. Once Nielsen and Carrier IQ get some data from the devices they are monitoring, consumers will have a clearer picture when it comes to what mobile carriers and what networks are truly offering a 4G experience.
Update (Oct 25th, 2011):
we received an email from the VP of Communications at Nielsen who asked us to add a clarrification statement on this issue as follows:
Saw your piece about the Nielsen alliance with Carrier IQ (link below) and just wanted to clarify that no information will be collected without the explicit consent of users who have agreed to participate in Nielsen’s opt-in panels. The privacy of panelists is of utmost importance to Nielsen and we ensure that all personally identifiable information is removed from reports and all reported data is made anonymous.
