Is your ISP throttling your Internet connection or is it just time to get a new computer? How much bandwidth are you actually using? Are you getting the Internet speeds promised by your provider?
These may seem like basic questions, but they are not easily answered. At the root of last year's Comcast network management debacle was whether or not the cable provider was blocking access to file-sharing Web sites. Comcast said no, the Federal Communications Commission said yes, but we never got a clear answer.
Measurement Lab (M-Lab), a new open platform announced Wednesday, is looking to clear up that confusion.
M-Lab is the brainchild of Google, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute (OTI), and the PlanetLab consortium. It will allow a platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools in order to share data about their accuracy and reliability.
“Researchers lack widely distributed servers with ample connectivity," Vint Cerf, Google Internet evangelist, wrote in a blog post. “This poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools. Researchers also have trouble sharing data with one another."
These may seem like basic questions, but they are not easily answered. At the root of last year's Comcast network management debacle was whether or not the cable provider was blocking access to file-sharing Web sites. Comcast said no, the Federal Communications Commission said yes, but we never got a clear answer.
Measurement Lab (M-Lab), a new open platform announced Wednesday, is looking to clear up that confusion.
M-Lab is the brainchild of Google, the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute (OTI), and the PlanetLab consortium. It will allow a platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools in order to share data about their accuracy and reliability.
“Researchers lack widely distributed servers with ample connectivity," Vint Cerf, Google Internet evangelist, wrote in a blog post. “This poses a barrier to the accuracy and scalability of these tools. Researchers also have trouble sharing data with one another."
