Measurement Lab is a joint initiative by the Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and Google. Excerpt:
"Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. The goal of M-Lab is to advance network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. By enhancing Internet transparency, M-Lab helps sustain a healthy, innovative Internet. When an Internet application doesn't work as expected, how can you tell whether the problem is caused by your broadband connection, the application or something else? It can be very difficult for professional network administrators, let alone average Internet users, to answer this sort of question today. Transparency has always been an essential component of the Internet's success, and Internet users deserve to be well-informed about the performance of their broadband connections. For that to happen, researchers need resources to develop new analytical tools."
The tools currently or soon to be available via M-Lab are:
- Network Diagnostic Tool to help you test your connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of problems limiting speed;
- Glasnost to test whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled;
- Network Path and Application Diagnosis to diagnose common problems that impact last-mile broadband networks;
- DiffProbe (coming soon) to determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic;
- NANO (coming soon) to determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations.
Thanks to Dick Moore for highlighting this.
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