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I've been on Sprint for nearly 2 decades now despite them being the "worst" carrier because, aside from a short 1-year stint in a rental apartment, I've been fortunate to live and work in places where they had great service. Right now my home is close enough to one of their towers that I use my phone as a hotspot whenever my home Internet goes down. I typically get 25-40 Mbps from them at home, which is actually close to double the national average speed for Verizon and T-Mobile. And I'm on an ancient grandfathered plan with unlimited data and no hotspot restriction, so am extremely reluctant to switch carriers.

Run it, use its maps. Carriers lie, radios don't.

https://opensignal.com/

Meh, my own searching isn't that good; I found the wrong year first. Here is the new report.

Ok, UK is 54th in the world according to some league table that doesn't seem to get fully published in either of the sources linked in the summary. So who are the 53 higher ranked countries?

For those who couldn't be bothered searching, the full table is here.

It really depends where you are. If you're in their 3G area, you'll be lucky to get 0.3 Mbps. But if you're within range of their 4G cells, about 5 Mbps is typical, with some areas getting 20-35 Mbps. When i bought my house last year, it had Sprint 4G coverage, and I lived off of it (I have an unlimited plan and my phone is rooted so I can tether) for 2 months while waiting for my cable Internet install date. I averaged about 60 GB/mo for those two months. (My normal usage is only about 300-500 MB/mo, so I have no qualms about sucking up huge amounts of data 1 or 2 months out of the year.)

That's really what Sprint's problem is. If they could get better 4G coverage, they'd be golden. Right now they've only got 64% LTE coverage vs 77%-84% for T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon. (Scroll down to LTE coverage by network, and select U.S. from the dropdown.) Their slower LTE speeds are also a symptom of insufficient coverage. Since I know the location of the tower giving my home 4G service, I've measured speeds at various distances. I get 25 Mbps right next to the tower, about 15 Mbps at home (about a mile away). But as I move to more typical tower distances of 3 miles, it drops down to 5 Mbps or less. By 5 miles (or behind hills), I've lost 4G service entirely. This particular tower hasn't yet gotten the Sprint Spark treatment yet (tri-band LTE), so it could potentially go up to 80 Mbps in the future, though I doubt their range will improve since two of their bands are at 1.9 and 2.5 GHz (the third is 850 MHz). The question is will Sprint be able to come up with enough money to upgrade their network to become more competitive.

If #1-54 have average LTE speeds of 11 Mbps, then 10 Mbps is not that bad.
If #1-54 have average LTE speeds of 90 Mbps, then 10 Mbps sucks.

Rank on an arbitrary list is meaningless. If you want to compare against a distribution, compare to the distribution itself. Not some arbitrary index. The distribution is linked in TFA and is vastly more informative than TFA or TFS. In fact it's one of the best interactive data presentations I've ever seen. It should've been linked as TFA, not some article talking about it.

Most of the countries are clustered between 8-18 Mbps. #43 (the previous U.S. rank) is 13 Mbps. If the U.S. were to increase its LTE speed by 50% to 15 Mbps it would jump to #28. And if it were to double its speed to 20 Mbps, it would jump to #12.

Many Android devices have alternate OSes (Cyanogenmod, etc) that support the device for far longer than the OEM did.

That's another example of the freedom you get with the Android platform instead of iOS.

Android, Fuck yeah!

"Many" meaning about 500 across all ROMs, including the sort-of and the formerly supported ones (Yes, even Cyanogen drops support for older phones). Problem is, OpenSignal found 24,093 distinct Android devices in their recent survey, up from 18,796 last year.

So the chances that a random Android phone can be upgraded with any of those alternates is still lower than 1 in 10. Way lower.

I've always used Verizon (for several years now via Straighttalk), because on paper their coverage outside of cities looks better than the rest, including AT&T. But on several recent road trips between Baltimore and West Virginia on I-70 and I-68, I've had zero (as in zilch, none, nada) Verizon coverage from Hagerstown MD west to and including Fairmont WV, while my daughter's AT&T (Straighttalk) has fine coverage almost all the way. So I'm wondering whether the on-line maps I've found are really accurate. http://opensignal.com/ does seem to show Verizon disappearing past Hagerstown, and AT&T continuing, which at least in this case seems to match reality.

How reality is outside of the couple areas I've traveled, I don't know. Along the interstate is usually good, off that...YMMV.

Here's a coverage map - http://opensignal.com/coverage...

Most of the population centres, it seems.

I wonder if they have managed to produce any *decent*, affordable Android phones out of Tierra del Fuego yet. That silly electronics tax that just hikes up the prices of international brands, so I'd be curious if they have produced quality tech competitive of what's coming out of Asia. They have the same 240V wall sockets as here in Australia - so I could use my electrical devices there but allegedly the wiring was crippled slightly different to disallow exporting Argentinian goods to Australia without regulatory oversight? Well it's all micro-usb now anyway, at least for phones...

In typical MS fashion it didn't get good until 3 versions later, IE4, before getting proprietary vendor lockin with that piece of shit IE6.

If IE6 was such a piece of shit, as you put it, that implies that the other browsers at the time were much worse than that. You've inadvertently made a profound statement about the browser landscape of the day. IE6 rightfully earned infamy in its unnaturally long life even more repugnant is rampant revisionism. IE introduced a feature that is the foundation of today's web, some of you might be aware of the XMLHttpRequest object, for the non-developers it's like the force now, all around us. JavaScript support and performance, CSS support. Unfortunately this period had to occur, and it will occur again once these lessons are forgotten; Without the stranglehold IE6 eventually obtained, and more importantly stagnated the web with, the choices we have today wouldn't exist.

Their stupidity of not being able to down-grade IE or simultaneously install different versions so web developers could test ALL the various versions, forcing people to rely on hacks like SandBoxie, was absolutely retarded.

As much as it pains me to say Microsoft wasn't unique in this regard, as an aside, try installing multiple versions of Safari. Even the easy mode package managers don't support multiple versions of browsers out of the box (not to say it's difficult). Internet Explorer 6 released in 2001 following the launch of Windows XP. For those unfamiliar with their history, Web Development of that era revolved around IE and Netscape. With IE being the Chrome of its day (as in "works here, onward!") since the browser market was 90%+ IE and IE6 was supported on Windows 98, NT, and 2k. Low usage for potential targets results in a chicken and the egg problem. Low single digits just aren't a priority for many shops, see Opera.

Sandboxie came out in 2004ish and has its uses, especially on 32bit machines. However, for web development involving IE it's much easier to use MultiIE which has been around since 2006. IETester is worth another mention. Not to mention there are alternatives due to the ever growing number of devices and variants released year after year, requiring a different approach such as farms that show screenshots from targeted browsers. Regarding the hassle of Sandboxie, limiting yourself to one tool is pretty silly.

This is a little off topic. Since this criticism is being framed as a Microsoft issue you might be shocked to discover how apps and to a lesser extent websites, are developed and tested in 2015 on devices manufactured and supported by multiple vendors. This process requires physical devices, in many cases multiple to support the popular OS versions on them (there are other OS, but they're less than 8%). Think it's a hack to wrangle Sandboxes or multiple installations, try wrangling devices that let you only upgrade! But what about device simulators, one might ask? Oh yes, they do exist and they're improving but there isn't a substitute for deploying and testing on device. IE variants are a dwindling piece of the very large fragmentation pie.

Microsoft writing the browser from scratch, is too little, too late.

Too late for whom? W

The fragmentation problem doesn't reference the hardware options; the Android OS is fragmented beyond belief. http://opensignal.com/reports/...

Of course, political involvment is the more adequate approach to a political problem. But why neglect the technical tools?

According to the US constitution, arms is the correct approach to governmental oppression.

But far be it for me to advocate the constitution, because that's illegal...

Why not both? The database of cell phone towers that shows you which tower you're connected to already exists:
http://opensignal.com/android/

It's more useful for trying to figure out where to go to get the best signal in your environment, but if you can use it to figure out when you're being oppressed, then all the more power to you.

You haven't heard of Cyanogenmod, have you? It's an alternative operating system you can install on Android devices (I know I'm not the only person who twitches when people say "androids" to refer to any Android device, as if all of them are equivalent and running the exact same software).

On the Cyanogenmod page I counted 225 supported devices. http://opensignal.com/reports/fragmentation-2013/ says they found 11,868 distinct devices running Android - back in 2013.

Try learning about formalised testing (ISTQB), then look at the mobile testing market http://opensignal.com/reports/... and make a killing out of the lack of standards in the Android Market.

Someone finally got to the point. Know what cell towers you connect to so you know you are not connected to one that suddenly came into existence.

There is an app for that

You'd have to rip the GPS chip out, for example, to actually disable location monitoring.

(Tin foil hat on) And even then, they can still triangulate your location from the cell phone towers. Also, it's possible in many cases to get your location from comparing the WiFi access points that your phone sees to a database compiled by wardriving or from users using something along the lines of http://opensignal.com/. (Tin foil hat off)

there was a distributed "3g survey" mapping project that the BBC tried a while back and its still on-going using OpenSignalMaps which will no doubt come back into fashion as the 4G rollout starts up in earnest.