App Profile: Smart Radio Monitor

Smart Radio Monitor (SRM) is a European Commission crowdsourcing project designed to gather and share radio spectrum data about mobile telephony coverage, Wi-Fi channel occupancy, broadband and net neutrality connection tests. Anyone with a recent iPhone can download an app which will automatically record the characteristics of the signal they’re getting on their phone — Wi-Fi, 4G, 3G, 2G or nothing — and test the latency, upload and download performance of their internet connection with additional net neutrality tests they can select. This data is saved locally to the phone and can be sent back to the SRM research database. The aim is then to plot the aggregated findings on a map, on an interactive website (http://srm.jrc.ec.europa.eu).

The app is free to download, does not contain any advertisements and uses very little bandwidth and battery. The data is anonymised and the JRC will not collate or store any personal data.
It could tell us, for instance, whether our mobile networks are capable of delivering broadband connectivity in parts of the country where the fixed-line service is patchy, whether coverage across cities is consistently good and whether some operators are supplying a better service than others.

It may help also enforcement agencies and the European Commission to better assess, for example:
• whether the various cellular operators are really giving good signal strength overall of the MS territory;
• whether 2.4GHz/5GHz Wi-Fi channels over Europe are fully crowded or there whether there is still available space;
• whether the European Commission’s radio spectrum policy programme (RSPP) target of a broadband speed of 30 Mb/s by 2020 (Article 3(c) of Decision No 243/2012/EU) will be reached;
• whether internet service providers are blocking some protocols on their network.

Continued use of GPS running in the background can dramatically decrease battery life.