If you do mostly remote work like I do you will like this app. It measures your network speed , manually or on the background and creates a map of your network's speed. What is even better, it sends your network measurements to Netradar's cloud so what you actually see is an average of all Netradar users.
If I want to go outside hiking or camping I can check from Netradar in advance does the places I'm going to go have a good enough network to do also ad-hoc working. If that place is " a white spot on the map" I simply take the measurements myself and the white spot is gone! Crowdsourcing with a simple pushing a button.
With Netradar you can take measurements manually but the new version has also a feature that measurements can be taken continuously on background. It will not be a network hog. The data transferred using this background mode should be less than 1 MB per day. This mode is great if you want to for instance go for a short hike but don't want to make stops to take manual measurements.
The maps accuracy in the app is 200 meters but the data in the cloud has the original GPS accuracy so it is possible that there will be better resolution later. I would like to see for instance if I'm in "blind spot" and just look from the map where should I walk for a better network.
Netradar is an academic project in Aalto University's Department of Communications and Networking.
If you are not afraid of little science here's a paper from the project:
A Hybrid Approach to Measure Quality-of-Service in Modern Cellular Networks
Most of the measurements in the database are still from Finland so I invite non-finnish people to measure your favorite spots :)
Netradar website
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