There are a number of reasons for creating an account.
With an account you can get a more personalized view of the map, and create an alert for a city you'd like to watch for latency.
You can also help this project by running a small bash program that will upload latency data and help improve the quality of the map for everyone. If you upload data, your account will be upgraded, and have full access to all we offer at no cost, even as we add paid services in the future.
Uploading data is easy, fully automated, and has the added benefit of increased monitoring of your location on the map.
The latest script can be found on github.com/dstrickler/IWM_Trace