Rubbishing the UK's 5G coverage Philip Maguire, Inakalum

Bin lorries are revealing how poor the nation's mobile coverage really is

- Philip Maguire, Inakalum

When the bin lorry comes trundling down the road, few people would expect it to be doing anything more than collecting the rubbish. However, it might well be helping to identify one of the many holes in the UK’s mobile coverage.

Inakalum measures the actual throughput delivered by the country’s major mobile networks in a variety of ways. CEO Philip Maguire told us why the company’s equipment is being installed on bin lorries and reveals the dire state of our mobile networks’ performance.

PC Pro: How did your company get started?

We started in 1995 and we've been writing telecoms software ever since. In around 2017, we started developing a new platform for geospatial mapping. We started with public places, places of interest, and then moved into street asset mapping.

Obviously, there are ten times as many street assets as there are public places, so we needed to speed it up. So we added AI to use image recognition, so that when you take a photograph of a bollard it says “this is a bollard” or whatever.

When we started showing that to people, they said that would be really interesting for small cells for 5G and 4G intensification. And when we showed it to the telecoms people, they said if you could survey the [mobile] coverage in those areas to go with the assets, that would be really, really interesting. So we went, “Okay, back into telecoms we go!”

PC Pro: You've recently started a project in Tees Valley, where you've put your measuring equipment on bin lorries. Why bin lorries?

Philip Maguire: Everybody gets their bins collected, so the lorries travel every street. So, we know that we get the full coverage and the baseline survey.