Google today announced a new product, called Measurement Lab, to help you determine if your ISP is throttling bandwidth and perhaps interfering with your downloads.
The product is described as follows:
Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open, distributed server platform for researchers to deploy Internet measurement tools. The goal of M-Lab is to advance network research and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. By enhancing Internet transparency, M-Lab helps sustain a healthy, innovative Internet.
This is basically a distributed way of proving what many have found out already that ISPs have been throttling bandwidth. This continues to happen and I have recently followed the news about Cox as well as Comcast.
The reason for doing this in an open way and having deep roots in academia Google can rely on data collection done by others to help prove their case on net neutrality. Google does not want to foot the bill for the connectivity charges the ISPs would like to share with the search giant, so they are arming their biggest advocates in the net neutrality fight; its users.
By figuring out which ISPs are participating in this practice we can hopefully avoid situations as has happened in the past few years where it takes serious investigating to find out if the ISP is actually responsible.
I for one hope unlimited bandwidth continues and this leads to more connections in more places for more people. Limiting connectivity and bandwidth seems counterproductive as more people join the Internet.
June 17th, 2010 at 9:29 am
Is Mlab one of those services that requires registration? Every time I want to check the bandwidth on my VPS unlimited bandwidth I need to make an account and it's so very annoying!