FCC Launches Consumer Broadband Test

The FCC officially launched its consumer broadband test broadband.gov today. The site utilizes the Measurement Lab (M-Lab) platform and gives consumers a way to test the speed and other performance measurements of their broadband connections. The Broadband.gov website will randomly assign users to one of two measurement tests - Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) hosted on M-Lab, or a speed test from Ookla. Users will also have the option to run the M-Lab test upon completion of the Ookla test.

M-Lab is proud to be a part of this effort. Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) is an open-source tool created by Rich Carlson and Internet2. M-Lab is an open, distributed server infrastructure developed for researchers to deploy Internet measurement systems and was founded by the New America Foundation's Open Technology Initiative, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google Inc. and academic researchers. Since its founding, additional partners have worked to support the project, including Voxel, the Hellenic Telecommunications and Post Commission (EETT), the Greek Research and Technology Network (Grnet), Amazon Web Services, and BitTorrent, Inc.

We are also heartened that the FCC has chosen to work with NDT on M-Lab because we view openness as key to promoting accurate broadband measurement and advancing network research. Among M-Lab's core goals is to advance network research by actively promoting openness and transparency: research tools on M-Lab must publicly publish their source code and the NDT data collected is being made available to the public on the Measurement Lab Data Repository under a “no rights reserved” Creative Commons license.

M-Lab believes that open tools and open data access facilitate peer-review, independent analysis, and better network research. M-Lab supports third-party clients, allowing anyone to incorporate M-Lab tools into their own web pages, applications, and services. Our goal is to facilitate innovative arrangements like the FCC's Consumer Broadband Tool and BitTorrent Inc.'s use of NDT in µTorrent 2.0 Beta. Over 2.8 million NDT tests have already been run and M-Lab publicly released the first 500 Gigabytes of data earlier this year.

By taking advantage of NDT, the FCC is helping to expand the amount of open broadband data available. Each time a user runs the NDT tool through the FCC's site (or elsewhere) valuable data is generated for that individual. While the FCC's website only exposes a few of the metrics NDT collects (upload and download speed, latency and jitter), you can see the full functionality of Network Diagnostic Tool's by running the test directly from the M-Lab site

We encourage you to visit the FCC's site, check out the latest broadband policy news and test your broadband performance at broadband.gov.

For more information, also see our FCC and M-Lab collaboration page.