Free tools available via Measurement Lab (M-Lab)

Jan 29, 2009 11:31 GMT  ·  By

Free tools made available by Google in collaboration with the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, and academic researchers, are designed to measure Internet connections and to even test whether BitTorrent is blocked or throttled. The Measurement Lab (M-Lab) was born in response to the need to evolve network research and to provide end users with the resources necessary for them to test their broadband connections. According to the Mountain View-based search giant, Measurement Lab is essentially an open platform that supports the deployment of Internet research measurement tools.

“Researchers are already developing tools that allow users to, among other things, measure the speed of their connection, run diagnostics, and attempt to discern if their ISP is blocking or throttling particular applications,” revealed Vint Cerf, chief Internet evangelist, and Stephen Stuart, principal engineer. “These tools generate and send some data back-and-forth between the user's computer and a server elsewhere on the Internet. Unfortunately, researchers lack widely-distributed servers with ample connectivity. This poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools. Researchers also have trouble sharing data with one another.”

M-Lab is set up to address all the issues researchers have in both harvesting data but also sharing and collaborating. “Over the course of early 2009, Google will provide researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe. All data collected via M-Lab will be made publicly available for other researchers to build on. M-Lab is intended to be a truly community-based effort, and we welcome the support of other companies, institutions, researchers, and users that want to provide servers, tools, or other resources that can help the platform flourish,” Cerf and Stuart added.

At this point in time, a total of three tools are already available to end users. Hosted on servers near Google's headquarters, the Network Diagnostic Tool and Network Path and Application Diagnosis are set up to help users diagnose problems with their broadband speed. At the same time, Glasnost is designed to assess whether traffic involving torrent (BitTorrent) files is blocked or throttled.