[Edward Kirk]

On August 14th, Wired.com asked iPhone 3G users around the world to test their network speed at their location and submit it so they could document network speeds around the world? Well, since then they've gathered information contributed by over 2,600 participants around the world, and they just finished compiling their findings.

As they stated, the information was all entered into a map. The download speeds of each user is represented by a colored bar (zooming in will show more colored bars where the blue dots are). In general, they found that (not surprisingly) the network the device is on has more to do than the hardware of the device. On that note, they suggest that they don't think it's likely that a software update from Apple is going to fix the problems.

Their findings show a ton of fascinating information on things like what countries have the fastest coverage, what the average download speeds are like, and how the different carriers around the globe match up to one another. We strongly suggest you check it out at Wired.com. The map itself is shown at ZeeMaps.com, and they published all of their results in a massive spreadsheet at Google Spreadsheets.

[Stephen007]

The map is neat and all but does need to be taken with a grain of salt. Each data point only represents 1 snapshot of connectivity at that particular moment. In reality I would think that many of these cell sites have extrememly varied usage patterns that vary significantly over the course of the day. For instance, a cell tower near a major thoroughfare might be very bogged down on Monday morning during rush hour but could have much less (or more!) usage on a Sunday afternoon. Real data usability is going to be so varied & unpredictable that I'm not sure how useful this map really is.