Add semantic convention for describing network connectivity conditions

[bryce-b]

What are you trying to achieve?
On mobile devices, the state of network connectivity is very important. Determining the severity of a network issue can be greatly impacted by the networking state a mobile device is operating under. These values would only be useful applied to network transactions.

I would like to add several semantic conventions to the spec to describe network conditions on a mobile device. To get the conversation started here a some proposed attributes:

network.effectiveType
This can describe whether the device is connected via wifi, 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G.

network.carrier
Describes the cellular carrier if applicable. e.g. : Sprint

network.isoCode
2 character country code per ISO 3166-1 standard. e.g.: DE for Germany

network.mobileCode
The mobile network code (MNC) of a cell service provider. e.g.: 050
Though this is a numeric code, it's probably wise to transmit as a string to preserve leading zeros.

network.countryCode
The mobile country code (MCC). e.g.: 312
This may also have leading zeros and should be transmitted as a string.

The MCC & MNC can be used to uniquely identify a mobile network operator. All three codes are valuable, as one particular MCC may service multiple countries.

For more information on these values : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_country_code

[Oberon00]

These seem potentially useful to me.

I think you are already suggesting that but just to add a rationale: Adding these per span would make sense as a device may have multiple connections. Also, resources being immutable or maybe soon append-only (#1298 (comment)) may not really fit that.

A few notes on the names in general:

1. We have a general naming guide at https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/v1.2.0/specification/common/attribute-and-label-naming.md which mandates the use of snake_case, so you would use network.effective_type, etc. instead of network.effectiveType.
2. We already have namespaces net, net.peer and net.host, see https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-specification/blob/v1.2.0/specification/trace/semantic_conventions/span-general.md#general-network-connection-attributes. I believe these attributes would best be put under net.host or maybe net.host.mobile / net.host.cellular.

And on particular names:

3. effectiveType: Why "effective"?
4. isoCode: That's too generic IMHO. Maybe iso_country_code
5. mobileCode, countryCode: if MNC/MCC are well-known enough, I would go for using these, or their expanded equivalents (for example mobile_network_code instead of just mobileCode). Especially countryCode is confusing together with isoCode.

The MCC & MNC can be used to uniquely identify a mobile network operator. All three codes are valuable, as one particular MCC may service multiple countries.

In that case maybe use *carrier.mcc, *carrier.mnc, *carrier.name as attributes?

[bryce-b]

effectiveType: Why "effective"?

The radio access technology name is rather esoteric, e.g.WCDMA, HSUPA, CDMAx1, etc. Categorizing them into more user friendly names is where the idea of "effective_type" comes from, e.g. 1G, 2G, 3G, etc.

[bryce-b]

4. isoCode: That's too generic IMHO. Maybe iso_country_code

maybe icc? If we decide mcc & mnc are ok.

I like *carrier.mcc, *carrier.mnc, *carrier.name.

I'll defer to the experts on namespace, net.host might be a good place.

I forgot to mention one additional caveat with effective_type it may also be wifi, under which case all the other information would probably be moot.

[bryce-b]

how about the following?
net.host.connection_type: 5G,4G,3G,2G,1G, wifi,unavailable (String)
net.host.carrier.mcc : mobile country codes (String)
net.host.carrier.mnc : mobile network codes (String)
net.host.carrier.name: Carrier names (String) (e.g.: T-Mobile, AT&T, etc)
net.host.carrier.icc: 2-character iso country code (String) (e.g.: US, DE)