ben's blog

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.

Among M-Lab's main goals is to enhance transparency and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. 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? Users now have two new tools that can help with that effort.

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.

With the release of µTorrent 2.0 Beta, BitTorrent has added some important features to make the application more "network friendly" and improve the user experience. µTorrent is one of the most powerful network applications a user is likely to install and can now be used not only to share files, but also to provide useful information about users' networks and their Internet connections.

by Matt Mathis

Overview

The Side Stream Experiment consists of 3 MLab components: a standard webserver with sample data, a daemon collecting Web100 exit statistics and daemon collecting raw TCP packet traces (tcpdump). These are running in the same MLab/Planetlab slice as NPAD, and indeed, NPAD shares the same webserver for its own use.

We're happy to announce that Amazon Web Services is partnering with us to make M-Lab's broadband data publicly available. Anyone is allowed make use of this information without restriction, under a "no rights reserved" Creative Commons Zero waiver.