NoServiceHere is funded by the UK Cabinet Office - Geospatial Commission and Innovate UK. It is joint research between UK SME Ranplan and the University of Warwick, led by Dr. Weisi Guo (School of Engineering) and Prof. Rob Procter (Department of Computer Science); both Turing Fellows.

The project aims to identify digitally poor mobile-service connected areas and curate geospatial data of wireless black-spots to enable 5G services across urban and rural regions. The campaign focuses on reminding the Twitter users to include geotagging and #NoServiceHere whenever they want to complain or report about the problem of mobile services they encounter (indoor/outdoor) regardless of the mobile carriers. In case they do not have internet access at the time they need to complain, we also want to remind them to do so once they reconnect to the internet.

Based on the research articles, less than 1% of Tweets had been geotagged. One may think that accuracy may be a problem as Twitter geo-location can be temperamental. This can be varied depending on the users' input and how honest they are as they can manually tag the location they prefer. That's why the project co-ordinators are hoping to inform users that if they put the location correctly, this will help and impact not just their community but at the national level.

Here are 4 easy steps for when mobile users encounter poor mobile signal

1. Remember the location of that poor service spot;

Once you have internet access:
2. Report how many signal bar and the problem (how it has affected you)

3. Add geotag that blackspot regardless of the mobile operators

4. Add #NoServiceHere

Guidance on how to add a geotag in a Tweet can be found here: https://twitter.com/NoServiceHereUK/status/1162373446745120778

The researchers acknowledge that humans can make a mistake as they can forget to report or geotagging. However, achieving at least 10 percent of the people we reach out can hugely benefit the research, the British mobile users and many UK organisations; leading to better development of 4G and 5G coverage and wireless network infrastructure in different parts of the UK.

The project ultimately aims to make the UK a better connected nation. The intention is not to expose the users' location or privacy, but to help leverage mobile provision and connectivity that lead to better user experience and can support wireless network infrastructure at the national level.

The project has also received a grant from Innovate UK: https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/5g_to_rid/

You can read about the research underpinning the project here:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0142209

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.5153/sro.3001