NDT Data in NTIA Indicators of Broadband Need
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) recently released a new public map, the Indicators of Broadband Need. Pulling together different sources of data in this excellent, publicly available resource is helpful to communities as they plan how and where to improve broadband services for their residents. Historically, many factors have made it difficult for communities in the US to address digital inequities through federal subsidies, notably the well publicized inaccuracies of federal data sources on broadband deployment from the FCC. This process is changing and hopefully improving at the FCC. But the landscape of assessing or measuring who does and doesn’t receive quality and affordable Internet service is also complicated by the conflation of multiple measurement data sources covering different aspects of Internet connectivity and user experience. The different data layers in the Indicators of Broadband Need provide a chance to step back and examine all currently available sources, understand what they are measuring, how they differ, and what aspects of Internet service are not yet being measured, but should be. The Internet is a complex system, and the reality is that no one measurement methodology or data source is sufficient to measure its performance.
M-Lab's Murakami Tool - Supporting Structured Research Data Collection from the User Perspective
Many people know M-Lab and our TCP performance test, NDT, from running it in a web browser. Perhaps the largest single source of NDT tests comes from its integration by the Google Search team. While M-Lab is known for the large volume of crowdsourced test data resulting from people running our tests, over the past few years we’ve developed new ways to run our tests and open source Internet measurement tests from other platforms using a tool we’ve called Murakami.
Evolution of M-Lab's Geographic and Network Annotations
In our recent roadmap post, we shared a list of milestones that the team is working on this and last quarter. Our Datatype migration and Standardized Columns milestone references the gardener service, which maintains and reprocesses M-Lab data, as well as the UUID annotator, that generates and saves per-connection metadata as annotations to user-conducted measurements. This post provides more detailed information about how these services have annotated measurements with geographic and network information in the past and present, and expands on what current work is happening now as mentioned in our roadmap post.
M-Lab Discuss list Newsletter - March 2021
Hello!
I hope this finds you well. Today I’m writing with the first of many newsletters that you’ll receive on this mailing list. In each monthly edition, we’ll provide updates about M-Lab such as changes to our platform and pipeline, data schemas, community tools, best practice analyses, community case studies, documentation and guides, and more. Ultimately, our goal is to communicate with you on a more regular basis, so we encourage you to reply with any questions or comments that come to mind. Additionally, as part of our efforts to communicate more effectively, we’ve established a lightweight set of community guidelines that we ask participants to keep in mind as you engage here and on any other M-Lab hosted forum. If there is anything you’d like to see in these newsletters, please do let me know. And without further ado!