For my pick this week, I’m choosing a broadband speed checker. This doesn’t exactly sound that interesting – but this speed checker comes with a twist – and a good one at that!
http://www.top10-broadband.co.uk/speedtest/
The pretense being that you carry out your speed test as normal (you know the drill – watch a rev counter representation of your download and upload speed and get a result that your mildly disappointed with.)
But there’s an additional step with this checker, that being you can geotag your result with your postcode it is added to an ever growing map of all users speed results.
Been fobbed off about your download speed based on distance to the exchange? Well now you’ve got the tools to confirm this or repute it. If you’re only getting 2Mbs download but your neighbors ares getting 8Mbs then you know somethings amiss.
The information is all integrated into a Google Maps application on the website
You can move around, zoom in and out, look at different areas. Each result is presented with the provider and you can chose to display upload or download speeds. Perhaps a great tool if you’re looking to move into an area? If you want more information on a result, this is also possible by just clicking the result.
With all this data, they have also put together some nice graphs of provider speed trends over time. Not just for standard Broadband but also mobile/3g broadband as well.
Nothing revolutionary about these graphs or speed tests but the website presents the information well and the geo-tagging of data and the fantastic mapping tools offered by Google have produced another great mashup.