SignalMap Brings You Real-World Cell Coverage Maps
Don’t you hate it when you go into your local mobile phone store and they show you that big, strangely colored “coverage map” that looks more like a kid with ADD’s crayon book than anything else? You really have no idea how all those jagged color boundaries translate into real-world coverage. Lucky for you and me, that might be changing with this new idea, SignalMap.
The service relies on, well, Us, to make it work, so be sure to see how you can contribute. Bottom line, SignalMap shows you a Google Maps mash-up of your location, overlayed with inputs of reported signal strength in each area. Live in a big enough area, with enough contributors, and you can see exactly how strong a signal you’ll be getting before you even go to where you’re going. Smooth.
This makes me think we need to see this as a WHERE Widget. Any developers want to tackle this one? Methinks you could get pretty darn popular, pretty darn fast!
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You won’t be able to use the widget to report dead spots.
And it you think you might be in a dead spot, you won’t be able to check to see if you are.
Sprint and T-Mobile both offer street level coverage maps on their Web sites based on where their towers are. (These are not the marketing maps that show the whole area as covered; they do actually show expected dead spots.)
Comment by Rocky Agrawal — July 6, 2007 @ 3:07 pm
I suggested this one way back. It’s a two-second application where you can duplicate the Verizon “Can you hear me now?” guy. You’ve got lat/lng, you might have signal strength from the phone’s API, you should just be able to automatically have the phone report the signal strength as it moves. If the phone doesn’t move, don’t report signal strength. If you don’t have the API for signal strength, require a person to hit a number from 0 to 5. If it’s 0 (you’ll have to queue up those locations for when you do have signal). It’s not a tough extension/widget to write. But it wouldn’t work for all carriers and phones - just a small subset of both cases.
Comment by Brian MacFarland — July 10, 2007 @ 5:35 pm