How Special is New Year Eve Traffic? Insights from Four Years 3G/4G/5G User Measurements

The specialness of New Year eve traffic is a telecoms industry fable. But how true is it, and what's the impact on user experience? We investigate this on the four UK cellular networks, in London, on New Year eve in 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19 and 2019/20 (covid cancelled 2020/21 & 2021/22). Overall, we captured 544,560 readings across 14 categories using 3G/4G/5G devices. This paper summarises our longitudinal readings into 10 observations on the nature of network performance, from a user's perspective, on special days such as New Year eve. Based on these, we confirm that mature 3G/4G networks are unable to deliver a consistent user experience, especially on atypical days. For example, on 4G, a user had a 60% chance to get a latency below 50 ms and 90% chance for 500ms. If repeated in mature 5G networks, it suggests that it is inadequate to support safety-critical 5G use cases.