MARKlab: Distributed Measurements in Public Mobile Networks at International Scale

As demand for reliable mobile connectivity in IoT has surged, assessing expected real-world QoS has become crucial. However, due to their complexity, large-scale mobile network performance studies, especially including outbound roamers, remain scarce. To this end, we introduce MARKlab, a scalable framework for measuring mobile network KPls such as latency, packet loss, throughput, and energy consumption in production environments. Conducting case study across four European countries, 12 operators and five radio access technolo-gies - 2G, 3G, LTE Cat-I, LTE-M, and NB-IoT - we analyze each parameter's impact on performance. Our results highlight significant differences in latency, reliability, and energy efficiency, particularly for low-power IoT. The acquired measurement data is made publicly available to both researchers and industry.