Blogs

Measurement Lab joins millions in the tech community and beyond in opposing SOPA/PIPA, two bills before Congress that would require Internet infrastructure providers (including application providers) to censor the web. Some provisions have technical flaws that threaten the Net's fundamental architecture that allows the Internet to function as an engine for innovation and change. These bills are intended to fight online piracy and illegal online content. We laud these goals, but SOPA/PIPA miss their mark.

Researchers at Georgia Tech and the University of Napoli have developed BISMark, a new tool that will run on a user's home router to measure Internet performance continuously over time. Besides providing a richer picture of network traffic, BISMark can help differentiate problems caused by a user's home network setup from ISP performance problems.

The recent addition of Google's data visualization tool to the M-Lab platform has become a huge success at allowing people to visualize their broadband connectivity and how it compares across geographical boundaries. However, work hasn't stopped there and this week new visualization metrics have been added to the tool for users to experiment with:

MeasurementLab is pleased to announce the addition of two new improvements to M-Lab's open-source and open-data Internet measurement solutions:

The FCC has recently announced an "Open Internet Apps Challenge," a contest soliciting submissions of software applications which empower citizens to "monitor and protect Internet openness." Winners of the challenge will be invited to the FCC to present their work to the Commission and be honored by a reception. Winning apps will also be featured on the FCC website and via the FCC's social media outlets.

We are pleased to announce that, due to the diligent efforts of the Google BigQuery team and M-Lab that new changes to the BigQuery tables have been released with much more data! Google BigQuery is a database engine for interacting with massive datasets like M-Lab's 170 terabytes of research data. The changes made to the system make it easier than ever to access the huge amounts of information from M-Lab's battery of open tests. Improvements include:

A Presentation given at the FCC Broadband Performance Measurement Workshop 2010-07-07. You can alternatively download a PDF Here.

Want a refresh on the who, what, and why of M-Lab? Read this intro to Measurement Lab and invitation to the research community to get involved, in the June ACM's Computer Communication Review available here. Authors Constantine Dovorolis (Georgia Tech), Krishna Gummadi (MPI-SWS), Aleksandar Kuzmanovic (Northwestern University), and Sascha D.

AARNet, Australia’s Academic and Research Network, has partnered with Google to deploy the first Measurement Lab servers in Australia. This marks M-Lab's first outpost in the Asia-Pacific region and represents another step to widening the global availability of measurement tools for users to learn about the nature of their broadband performance and expand upon and improve M-Lab's openly available measurement data. We encourage users located in this region to test your Internet connection.

We are pleased to announce that Google, an M-Lab partner, will be hosting M-Lab datasets (currently featuring tens of terabytes, and counting, from the NDT, NPAD, and Glasnost tools) on Google Storage for Developers.