[From an original article in The Marker]
Israeli start-up Continual has become a key player in the field of smart mobility and transportation services, providing telecoms companies and car manufacturers with a platform for monitoring communication quality and travel experience. In collaboration with the world’s largest mobile network operators, and also with Google, it is driving innovation by predicting network problems on roads and prioritizing routes based on communications quality.
If you have ever used your mobile phone to watch a live broadcast on a train, or tried to join an online conference call from your car on the way to the office, you will be familiar with the frustration you feel when the broadcast is interrupted, or the call is disconnected at the wrong time. Since their earliest days, cellular networks have faced the challenge of maintaining a continuous high call quality – first with voice, and more recently when web surfing or watching video while traveling.
The way the quality test is performed is by driving test vehicles traveling on major routes – a method that has hardly changed in principle since the 1990s, even though it generally samples less than 10% of the roads.
Subscribers can be surprisingly tolerant of poor connectivity when they are in a car or a train, which is still a common problem even in countries that have very good mobile infrastructure. Nevertheless, three trends are causing media providers to recalculate a route and to focus efforts on improving network performance on traffic arteries:
- The deployment of 5G, which sets a high standard of consumer expectations for connectivity. Subscribers who have invested in a 5G-enabled device expect a top-quality service, even on the move.
- The telecoms regulators in several countries are starting to impose strict requirements for cellular service availability.
- With the advent of connected cars and the evolution of autonomous vehicles, quality network coverage on the roads is no longer just desirable but has become essential for both functionality and vehicle safety.
Both 5G services and connected cars offer huge business potential for network operators, as long as they can demonstrate consistently high quality of service along all the main traffic routes. If they can meet this challenge, then highly profitable deals can be sealed with car manufacturers and logistics companies, along with many other opportunities.
Solving the operators’ coverage challenge
A forerunner in the field of smart transportation services, Continual was founded by Greg (Giora) Snipper and Omar Geva with a vision to provide telecoms operators and car manufacturers with a platform for monitoring communication quality and travel experience. A start-up with around 20 employees, Continual’s offices are located in Netanya, Israel, and it had a successful launch on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange in December 2021.
At the heart of the company’s technology is its machine learning capability, which powers the reconstruction of travel routes from the data of any subscribers who have used the network while on the move. The data is encrypted and anonymized to allay any privacy concerns. This solves the challenge of producing a remarkably accurate dataset without including location-specific sources. Further algorithms rate the communication experience along the subscriber’s journey based on a large number of parameters and quality indicators, across each road and railway route. Continual’s system informs the operators’ engineering departments of any communication problems observed on the roads, enabling them to carry out routine network repairs, of which some are fully-automated.
This gives Continual the capability to offer cellular operators a service that can replace conventional drive testing that uses specially-equipped test vehicles – a costly process representing a market value of around $1 billion. There is also a diverse range of other significant use cases for the stored and analyzed data in the future – for example car manufacturers would be able to program in-vehicle systems to prioritize traffic routes that offer better quality communication services. According to its founders, this combination of predicting network problems on roads and prioritizing routes makes Continual rather like an equivalent of Waze for the telecoms world.
Optimizing coverage for all types of traffic
Continual has already achieved some impressive business successes, and boasts a list of highly respected customers. Among those that can be mentioned by name are the Vodafone Group, with whom successful trial results have been published.
“Our engagement with Vodafone began in 2018, when it was first planning to move its databases to the cloud, as many organizations were doing,” says Greg Snipper. At the same time, the Group’s strategy team was defining how to prioritize applications based on cloud-transferred databases, as part of its Tech 2025 program, based on the same data. After successful field trials in two regional markets, the Vodafone Group signed a framework agreement with Continual to integrate Vodafone companies across other European countries into the same central system.
The implementation of the Continual solution by the Vodafone Group has very much been a joint venture, according to Snipper, with the two companies conducting joint research in various test environments with the aim of expanding the functionality of the technology. Vodafone and Continual have also made joint conference presentations on their successful collaboration and deployment of the mobility analytics system.
Another Tier 1 customer in the US, which one of the world’s largest telecoms operators, has deployed the Continual system right across the nation. This operator uses information on a day-to-day basis to analyze millions of routes every day, based on data collected from tens of billions of individual events.
Google Marketplace
In January 2022 Continual announced a major collaboration with Google. Explained Geva: “The name Google needs no introduction, but it is less well known that Google is now positioning itself as a significant global player in cloud-based information and data analytics infrastructure for both the communications and automotive markets. Thanks to our collaboration, this data is now accessible via Google Marketplace.”
The technology has a green aspect that also does not go unnoticed by the operators. Network quality evaluation is conventionally carried out by vehicles actually driving on the relevant roads –a method that has surprisingly hardly changed in essence since the installation of the first mobile networks several decades ago. This is despite the obvious shortcomings of this technique – only partial road coverage, the high costs associated with operating the vehicles and test equipment, and also the environmental pollution caused by so much travel. The benefits of switching to a digital method of monitoring based on the Continual system are not only about saving money and expanding the monitoring to the whole of the national road and rail networks. “Red roads” – those with the worst communication quality – become green, not only in terms of greatly improved quality but also because they are being monitored in an environmentally responsible way.
A few market statistics
- The market for drive testing services for network monitoring is forecast to reach about $1 billion in 2022.
- The 5G telecoms infrastructure market is estimated to reach more than $13 billion in 2026.
- In 2022, about 95% of new vehicles in the US are expected to be connected to the mobile network, and by 2026 the number of vehicles that are connected is expected to exceed the 500 million mark.