Why participate in OpenSignal’s crowdsourcing operations? Think of it as a symbiotic relationship – consumers get benefit out of the app’s features as well. You can use the app as a speed test tool to see if your carrier is living up to its mobile data claims, and it will keep a record of your own data, text, and minute usage.

The app also serves as a signal finder. It will point you in the direction of your carrier’s nearest cell tower and even find nearby open Wi-Fi access points if you’re looking for a faster connection. And if you happen to be shopping around for another service provider, the app will let you compare the performance of different carrier networks in your area.

Ironically, U.K.-based OpenSignal has been using its Android app data for years to extrapolate iPhone performance on U.S. networks. With the new iOS software, it will be able to track iPhone performance directly, as well as tap into a potentially huge pool of new crowdsourcers.

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OpenSignal has recorded more than 1,500 signal strength readings in eight metropolitan areas from devices connected to T-Mobile’s network: Denver, Kansas City, Las Vegas, New Orleans, New York City, San Diego, Seattle and the Bay Area. OpenSignal has mapped those signal readings on its blog, though it represents multiple signal readings as single data points, largely to respect the privacy of the testers.

Though the network isn’t commercially launched, OpenSignal CEO Brendan Gill told me that its crowdsourced app is popular with engineers at all of the carriers for ad hoc network measurements. What we’re most likely seeing, Gill said, is a bunch of technical workers from T-Mobile and its vendor partners that have the OpenSignal app loaded and running on their test devices. A good indication of this is that one of the devices sending data is a Samsung Galaxy S4, which isn’t yet available to the general public.

T-Mobile CTO Neville Ray has already confirmed that its LTE network is complete in Las Vegas and Kansas City, so test data from those cities is hardly a surprise. We’ve also seen evidence of the network in NYC: A GigaOM reader mapped out a cluster of cells in Astoria, Queens, and T-Mobile has given several live 4G demos to reporters in Manhattan.

The other five areas are new, but because of their importance you would expect them to show up early on T-Mobile’s national rollout schedule. OpenSignal recorded the biggest concentrations of tests in San Jose, Calif., and surrounding Bay Area cities like Mountain View, Santa Clara and Sunnyvale. OpenSignal even tracked tests in the East Bay, but recorded none in San Francisco proper.

The Seattle area had the second highest concentration of readings, many of them around Bellevue, which just happens to be the location of T-Mobile’s national headquarters. Las Vegas yielded many data points as well, though the signal readings in Denver, Kansas City, New Orleans, New York and San Diego were much more sparse.

OpenSignal also recorded about a dozen speed tests on T-Mobile’s LTE network, averaging an impressive 25 Mbps on the downlink and 8 Mbps on the uplink (though keep in mind that the network is largely empty so there’s no congestion). The speed tests were so few because they must be manually initiated, while OpenSignal’s app takes signal strength readings automatically on a regular basis.

Gill said that he’s fairly convinced that these eight markets will be among the first to launch based on the activity OpenSignal is tracking, though he cautioned that his conclusions don’t constitute a scientific study. The results are dependent on a fairly limited pool of people using OpenSignal’s app, so there are likely many more cities with live LTE networks that the company couldn’t track.

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T-Mobile’s LTE test in Queens mapped in purple

The reader, Milan Milanović, said that T-Mobile appears to be still deep in testing so the network is nowhere near ready for the kind of soft launch we saw for its HSPA+ network in the PCS-1900 MHz last year. Before T-Mobile officially launched that network, customers all over the country were connecting to it, and T-Mobile actively encouraged iPhone owners in San Francisco to take the reconfigured HSPA+ service for a spin during Apple’s World Wide Developer’s Conference.

Milanović said that the Astoria cells are actually invisible to most phones even if they support LTE at the proper band. He had to force his way onto the network by setting his Nexus 4 (which unofficially supports LTE in T-Mo’s 4G airwaves) to LTE-only mode and manually scan for a network connection. Milanović encountered a 5 MHz-by-5 MHz link in the 1700 MHz/2100 MHz frequencies, but he was allocated only half of the 37 Mbps of bandwidth that the network could theoretically support.

The network was also awfully shy once discovered. Whenever Milanović got a connection, the network would wait between five and 20 minutes to boot him off. Clearly T-Mobile isn’t quite at the point where it’s encouraging customers to try out its new 4G systems.

T-Mobile has already completed construction of its LTE sites in Las Vegas and Kansas City, and we’ve even started hearing reports of LTE sightings out of KC. This is the first activity we’ve heard of in NYC, though. For the most part, the new network has remained underground.

LTE test screenshots courtesy of Milan Milanović

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The U.S. was the second country to deliver commercial LTE networks on the world stage, but it ranks far lower in terms of 4G bandwidth delivered. OpenSignal found that networks in Hong Kong, Denmark, Canada, Australia, South Korea and Germany all performed better. The U.S. placed eighth, averaging downlink speeds of 9.6 Mbps.

Why the low scores? It probably has to do with the configuration of U.S. carriers’ networks. While most operators around the world secured 40 MHz of spectrum with which to launch their new 4G networks, U.S. carriers have been working with smaller swatches of airwaves. Verizon and AT&T are using 20 MHz for their initial rollouts, while Sprint and MetroPCS are dealing with as little as 10 MHz. If you’re working with half the spectrum, your connections will sport half the bandwidth.

Based in both London and Laguna Hills, Calif., OpenSignal collects its data through crowdsourcing, aggregating measurements recorded by millions of smartphones users who have downloaded its free Android app. There are a lot of similarities between the OpenSignal and Seattle’s RootMetrics. Root supplements its smartphone data with professional testing (see our video on one such drive test in Chicago), while OpenSignal relies entirely on crowdsourcing, but both have started generating very detailed maps of cellular network coverage and performance in different areas of the world. OpenSignal recently expanded its scope to encompass Wi-Fi.

What’s particularly noteworthy about OpenSignal’s latest report is just how far LTE has penetrated around the world in the last two years. OpenSignal tracked LTE signals in 62 countries, including multiple African countries and in the central Asian nations of Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan.

LTE image courtesy of Shutterstock user Inq

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Don’t worry, he isn’t up to anything illegal or creepy. Rather he works for mobile testing outfit RootMetrics. He’s running network tests on all four of the major carriers mobile networks, using an array of smartphones. Metz isn’t just taking a signal measurement here and running a speed test there. He’s recording thousand of individual data points each hour as he crisscrosses the week’s chosen city in a rental car, following a randomly generated path over highways, side streets and ultimately into stores, pharmacies, restaurants and building lobbies.

After a week or two or three – depending on the size of the market – he packs up his gear and moves to the next town. The measurements he collects will then go into the Seattle startup’s databases along with millions of data-points collected from consumers using Root’s crowdsourced testing app.

On Thursday, RootMetrics released its in-depth report on the performance of Chicago’s networks (Verizon took the overall prize). Metz was part of a team that took the measurements for that report back in November, and they invited us along to get a first-hand perspective on how he does his work. Of course we brought along a camera.

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A recent round of speed and performance tests in New York from RootMetrics revealed that data speeds from mobile broadband networks averaged 13.5 Mbps, nearly 2 Mbps faster than any in any of the other four boroughs. The home of the Yankees also clocked the best upload speeds in the city, averaging 5.8 Mbps.

Manhattan actually had the lowest download speeds of the five, though it sat right in the middle in terms of upload. It’s doubtful that the big four operators are neglecting Manhattan. Rather, its lower performance is probably a reflection of its much greater density of people and smartphones along with the difficulty of finding tower space in the overbuilt borough.

When broken down by carrier, things get interesting. In all five boroughs, Root recorded the fastest average speeds on AT&T’s LTE networks. Verizon’s LTE came in second in all five cases, while T-Mobile and Sprint were a distant third and fourth respectively (neither carrier has LTE in NYC yet). But in Root’s overall testing of the NYC metro region – which by Root’s definition spans northern New Jersey, bits of southern New York and most of Long Island — Verizon came away with the speed prize, averaging 13.4 Mbps to AT&T’s 10.3 Mbps. While AT&T has built LTE over ever inch of NYC, that coverage seems to fall off when you leave the city.

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RootMetrics uses a two-prong methodology to test networks. It does its own drive tests of city streets and indoor tests of buildings to come up with baseline scores, but then augments those results with millions of individual data points collected from its Android and iPhone crowdsourcing apps. It’s already used this system to build detailed cell-by-cell analyses of major US metro markets. Now big UK cities like London, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow are apparently in for the same treatment.

In its blog, Root has been encouraging US travelers to use the company’s crowdsourcing apps when on vacation – though due to the data drain from the app, you better have one hell of a roaming plan – but it has also recently made its smartphone apps available internationally. Though the company is still mostly unknown outside the US, customers all over the world have begun collecting data points that Root can use as it launches in new countries.

A recent speed RootMetrics speed test report for Chicago

There are no 4G mobile networks in the UK to test – not until Everything Everywhere gets its LTE network off the ground later this year – but the country’s multiple 3G networks will give Root plenty of fodder for its first reports.

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As you might expect from a town that thrives off a tourism and seasonal residents – 2 million visitors a year frequent the island – maintaining Hilton Head’s scenic views is a big priority for its local government, and  hulking cell towers tend to mar those vistas. As a result, tough restrictions on where cell towers can go have prevented the operators from expanding their networks, leading to poor and sometimes non-existent reception all over the island.

That may seem like a necessary trade-off for the sake or preserving the community’s standards, but the policy has now come into direct conflict with the town’s economic livelihood. It’s bad enough that residents have to endure poor service, but vacationers have come to expect good cellular coverage, especially the conference and executive retreat crowd. These days you can get decent signal on a cruise ship at sea, so why not in Hilton Head?

There’s an app for that – many of them

Hilton Head’s town council created a task force to find a solution to the coverage problem, and it reached out to RootMetrics, a Seattle-based wireless network-testing firm that uses crowdsourcing to collect much of its data. The task force recruited local volunteers to download Root’s network testing app on their smartphones and then fanned them across the island to test for signal strength, call success and data coverage and speed.

They came back with 20,000 data points, which Root compiled into detailed maps showing just where the problem spots lay. As you can see, Verizon fared much better than AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile, but there were still several problem spots in Verizon’s network as well.

RootMetrics CEO Bill Moore said that the detailed coverage maps gave Hilton Head the objective data it needed to make its case to the operators for more coverage. “But they also understood this wasn’t entirely a carrier problem,” Moore said. “Zoning and neighborhood aesthetic issues were also part of the problem, and there was a recognition that they needed to be more flexible to get carriers on board.”

According to the local paper, The Island Packet, the town council approved several of the task force’s recommendations to streamline cell tower permits and leases. Now all eyes turn to the carriers.

Lighting a fire under the operators

Verizon Wireless spokesperson Karen Schulz said that the operator has been talking with Hilton Head community leaders for years about improving coverage and quality, but there “have been some challenges.” Schulz said, however, Verizon was encouraged by Hilton Head’s new willingness to work directly with the carriers to solve their mutual problem.

That progress has resulted in plans to launch a new cell site in the southern part of the island. In addition, Verizon is working with a gated community Hilton Head Plantation to deploy a new LTE distributed antenna system, Schulz said, which would replace a normally imposing tower with numerous low slung antennas scattered throughout the neighborhood. Schulz said there are still other problem spots throughout the island, but Verizon plans to work with the community to resolve them.

“We really want to work hand-in-hand with them to not only have good quality service, but to make sure they also enjoy a good quality of life,” she said. “Aesthetics are definitely important.”

AT&T was less specific about its plans to improve coverage on the island, though AT&T gave us the following statement: “Going forward, AT&T is looking forward to working with the town of Hilton Head and the mayor’s task force in order to provide enhanced coverage for our customers in the area.”

While Hilton Head’s coverage problems are far from solved, Root’s Moore said he was surprised by how the community was able to mobilize to make their case before the carriers. In the past, towns with poor coverage or dead zones have had to rely solely on subjective data when arguing for better service, he said.

“If government and the populace can work together and the work cooperatively with the wireless industry it shows you can solve a lot of these problems,” Moore said.

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