Ahh.. the usefulness of data

So we have a few users now, and have collected enough samples I think a couple of charts showing some results would be useful.

Speed Reality Android Application Beta Test

Speed Reality BETA

In light of the carrierIQ controversy, and the fact that many carriers and phone manufactures are making claims about different speeds their network and phones are capable of, it seemed useful to create an application that actually provides YOU the information about the speed of your mobile device, including where and when real world speeds occur and comparison among other devices and carriers.

The SpeedReality application will gather NON-IDENTIFIABLE information (see below), test download speeds to your phone periodically, and record them for analysis and comparison.   It provides a few views into the data that phones gather, including a “heat map”, charts comparing your device to other devices, and charts comparing carrier speeds.

I want to reiterate, this is REAL WORLD speed, the total elapsed time it takes your device to download from a website.  This approach  reflects the holistic speed that these devices and your network providers actually provide.    To give you an example, the android emulator running a very fast personal computer, connected to the internet with a well known cable provider(~6MB/sec), only achieves about 500kBps.

Hopefully you will find this application useful.   In the future we hope to offer some alerting services as well that will let you know when you are in a location that receiving poor performance, as well as additional compare/contrast metrics.

The application is available on the android market, and only available for Android.  https://market.android.com/details?id=com.spdreality.SpeedReality

Now, a brief discussion on privacy.

This application collects your location (it tries to use network location (the location of the cell tower), unless you tell it it can use GPS, and even then it prefers network as this is faster).  Your location is uploaded to a central database, but only basic information about your device, which is shown below.  The phone identifies itself in two ways, through “deviceInfo” which is a partial view of http://developer.android.com/reference/android/os/Build.html  (it DOES NOT use your serial number or anything like that), and secondly through a unique id called “appID”, which is just a psuedo random GUID  - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Globally_unique_identifier that is generated when the application is installed.  Example data is below.