AARNet & Google Australia deploy M-Labs net measurement servers

Stuart Corner
Wednesday, 23 June 2010 11:20

Business IT - Networking

AARNet and Google have made the first deployment in Australia of Measurement Lab (M-Lab) servers, a move that they say will empower researchers and the public with tools to better understand the performance of broadband Internet connections.

According to AARNet, "By visiting measurementlab.net, Internet users can'¦test their Internet connection speeds, attempt to identify whether particular applications are being throttled, diagnose common problems affecting network connectivity and measure their connections in other ways." All collected data is made publicly available for anyone to use and build on.

AARNet says the Australian installation is also the first in Asia Pacific and the first in the Southern Hemisphere, and  will facilitate more accurate, robust measurement.

Chris Hancock, CEO of AARNet said: "Users can now test their Internet speeds with a network diagnostic tool that is used by researchers and governments around the world for an independent verification on a networks' connection speed'¦Data to be collected on the servers [will] be available to researchers and academics that have an interest in testing and deploying network diagnostic applications to advance the transparency and performance of the Internet.'

The M-Lab project is led by a group of international researchers, with supporting resources provided by a number of companies and organisations around the world. In the last year, M-Lab has been used by the US Federal Communications Commission and Greece's telecom authority to begin studying broadband services.

AARNet invites Australian users to take a look at the tools available on M-Lab, and to begin learning more about their own broadband connections by running the tests.

iTWire attempted to use both the M-Lab downloadable app for bandwidth testing (PathLoad2 for Mac) and the Javascript based network diagnostic test over  a Next G service. Both failed. The diagnostic tool got so far as to report an upload bandwidth of 144kbpbs, but we were in the bowels of a subterranean food court in the Sydney CBD.

M-Labs announced last week that Google was hosting M-Lab datasets  on Google Storage for developers. This service is accessible on an invitation-only basis.

"Google along with Amazon Web Services has made the commitment to make this data available to all of you," M-Labs said. "In addition to downloading the M-Lab datasets on Google Storage, it will be possible to analyse the data using Google BigQuery. BigQuery enables you to interactively analyse massive datasets using a SQL-like query language.

"Like Google Storage for Developers, BigQuery is in preview stage and is being made available to a limited number of people before the open public roll-out. In the meantime, a number of researchers have been granted preview access, and will be working with BigQuery to extract and share meaningful and currently unexamined information in M-Lab's raw data set."