The Federal Communications Commission, FCC, finally released its free Android application to let the U.S. customers precisely measure their cellular network and Wi-Fi connection speed as well as getting some detailed reports and information about their connection status. While FCC is providing customers with a great tool to track their data provider performance, they will have access to some great amount of data all around the U.S. regarding the cellular carriers’ statistics. For privacy concerns they have stated that no personally-identifiable information is collected and all the data gatherings are done anonymously.
To measure your mobile broadband performance, download and install FCC Speed Test application on your Android device and let the app do the rest.
The application runs in the background to collect data and perform some tests, and then delivers an accurate measure for your connectivity (both Cellular and Wi-Fi) performance in beautiful graphs with filtering tools and the option to view the statistics later as a Log. Tracking download and upload speed, Providing some information about Latency, Packet loss, Cell tower ID, Network Operator, Roaming status and Signal strength are the main features of FCC Speed Test.
As mentioned at the beginning, FCC is trying to collect some reliable data to measure the connectivity performance nationwide and the main issue here is to get enough users to install and use the app. To get a large enough population, FFC will be releasing its iOS app sometime in the January, and they have also some plans releasing the BlackBerry and Windows Phone versions too.
