Apple iPhone and iPad fans can now join Android users in testing their cellular or Wi-Fi mobile data speeds and reporting them to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to support the agency’s decision-making about broadband.
The agency now offers a free app in the iTunes App Store for measuring your mobile performance, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler announced this week at the Mobile World Congress trade show in Barcelona. The FCC’s Android app has been available on the Google Play store (link below) since last November.
The app lets you directly measure your current connection’s upload and download speed, latency, and packet loss–any of which you can choose to aggregate for a day, a week, a month, or a year. Unlike in the Android app, the iOS version can’t run periodically in the background; you have to manually test your performance. The app also collects data on your location, time of data collection, handset type and OS, and type of network.
After collecting this data, the app temporarily stores it on your device and periodically uploads it to the FCC’s servers without unique or persistent identifiers. You don’t have to send your data to the FCC, though–you can keep it just for your own reference. And if you choose to send it, you can set limits in settings as well for how much data you want the app to be able to transmit so you don’t exceed any data caps you may have.
The iOS users site iMore.com recently reviewed the app, and tested it against Ookla’s popular Speedtest.net app. The reviewer achieved similar results, but although the FCC Speed Test app measures more statistics than Ookla, it lacks the same server options.
The FCC Speed Test app for iOS is available in the Apple App Store and on Google Play.
