There have been some weeks now since Bing coverage of Brazil (and probably much more) have been extended, and many places in Brazil (and maybe elsewhere in the world) have turned into a editing frenzy. The map is improving quickly, some places so quickly that we start getting into conflicts because several users edits the same objects roughly at the same time. This is both a positive and negative thing. Positive because the map quickly improves, negative because it increases the possibility of having the same object duplicated sevaral times.

Another reasent development have been the switch of base map in FourSquare from google to OSM. At first several Brazilian cities turned into white spots in FourSquare, but some bright minds have taken unto them to correct this. At least one new active mapper have turned up because of this, helping putting more of Brazil on the map.

The effect this have had on the data is that the size of the XML files of Brazil have increased extremely. I am not able to do a check for all of Brazil (I neither have the bandwidth nor the discspace to do a comparison, nor have historical archives to show me the old sizes) but the state of Espírito Santo have close to doubled since chirstmas. If this is representative for the rest of Brazil than this might become challenging.

When that is said I have discovered another open project called openBmap (check out site) that collects harvested data regarding mobile phone (and wi-fi) coverage based on combining signal strengths with GPS possitions. I have installed their harvesting app on my mobile, and have collected a few points of ViVo coverage near Vitoria. I think I should have this logging running when driving around in the area, for the harvested ViVo data so far only shows 2G coverage, while there are quite lot of 3G coverage in the area. According to what I have read on the project it should be able to log 4G coverage, but to my knowledge this isn't available in Brazil yet.