Ookla looked at data from past New Year’s Eve celebrations to draw some conclusions about network impacts
As we settle into the start of 2025, Ookla has provided some analysis about the impact that major New Year’s Eve celebrations have on cellular networks around the world.
The testing and benchmarking company looked at data from previous New Year’s Eves, particularly NYE 2023/2024, for comparison.
The differences in user behavior between markets are significant, Ookla observed. While Belgium’s Proximus saw a 95% increase in mobile data traffic on New Year’s Eeve 2023 compared to 2022, Telstra in Australia actually sees customers use 30% less data than average on NYE.
And while the increased use of over-the-top applications such as WhatsApp muddy the data somewhat, general conclusions can still be made. The usage profile for New Year’s Eve is different, Ookla noted, with a big emphasis on uplink traffic as users share photos and live-stream video—and mobile networks are generally configured to support far more downlink traffic than uplink.
So where were users were most likely to run into sludgy 5G speeds that might put a damper on sharing their experiences of the celebrations? The network slow-downs were widespread, based on Ookla’s 23/24 New Year’s Eve analysis. Fully half of the cities in Ookla’s analysis had 10th-percentile upload performance of less than 1 Mbps—sub-par speeds that would make it, Ooka said, “nearly impossible to upload photos or videos.”
On the upside, however, the “fastest of the slowest” samples at the median and 10th percentile were in Dubai, followed by Rio de Janiero and then New York City.
While median speeds still offered decent performance, there was a big gap between the median experience and users who were in more challenging network conditions at the 10th percentile of performance. In Dubai, for example, median upload 5G speeds were 40 Mbps compared to median download speeds that still nearly reached 500 Mbps; but users in the 10th percentile had upload speeds of around 6 Mbps and download speeds of around 100 Mbps. So in general, New Year’s Eve usage slowed down even the fastest networks, and pulled fringe performance down compared to typical network conditions.
Read more of the analysis of New Year’s Eve usage and network impacts in Ookla’s blog post.
In other test news:
–Teledyne LeCroy has debuted a new HDMI 2.2 video analyzer and generator, which it says is the first of its kind. The new analyzer/generator enables HDMI testing up to 86 Gbps, the company said, and supports testing for use cases such as gaming, virtual reality and augmented reality.
–Pasternack is offering new, 1.0 mm cables for test set-ups for high-frequency environments up to 110 GHz.
–United Airlines said that it expects to begin testing Starlink-based in-flight Wi-Fi services next month on a commercial flight of a United Embraer E-175 aircraft. The airline signed a major deal with Starlink last fall to connect its entire fleet, and it is accelerating its deployment timeline. United said that it now plans to have its entire two-cabin regional fleet outfitted with Starlink connections by the end of this year, and that its first “mainline” Starlink plans will also be online before the end of the year.
United said that access to the Starlink-connected services will be free for its MileagePlus members and will include “game-changing inflight entertainment experiences like streaming services, shopping, gaming and more.”
–Trimble and Qualcomm are extending their relationship with advanced positioning capabilities for vehicles. Trimble’s Trimble ProPoint Go precise-positioning technology that combines GNSS signals with correction data, will be integrated into Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Auto 5G Modem-RF Gen 2 (which includes C-V2X and Non-Terrestrial Network connectivity), to enable positioning accuracy within 10 centimeters, according to a release.
Vehicles that include the joint positioning capabilities are in development now and expected to be on the roads by 2028.
“We are committed to delivering driver assistance technologies with a focus on achieving automated driving and creating a system that accurately responds to its surroundings,” said Jeff Arnold, VP of product management at Qualcomm Technologies, in a statement. “Our continued collaboration with Trimble allows us to add more reliable and accurate positioning to our technology stack that enhances our commitment to maintaining the highest levels of safety and system reliability.”
