Google sets up online broadband testing lab

zippyjuan · 01-28-2009, 05:04 PM

http://enews.earthlink.net/article/t...0128-274326165
Interesting feature. There are many places you can check you speed, but this will tell you if your provider is slowing you down.

Quote:

Google sets up online broadband testing lab
By PETER SVENSSON (AP Technology Writer)
From Associated Press
January 28, 2009 6:07 PM EST
NEW YORK - Google Inc. and two nonprofit partners Wednesday launched a Web site that lets consumers test their Internet connections to reveal possible interference and traffic management by service providers.

The site, Measurement Lab, addresses a need among academics who want to gather data on how Internet connections work in practice. While the workings of the core Internet "highways" are well known and standardized, it's difficult to find out what happens on the network of an Internet service provider, between the "highway" and the customer's home.

Internet service providers say they increasingly find it necessary to act as traffic cops on this stretch of the Internet to make sure that heavy users don't slow down their neighbors' connections. But the traffic management systems can have unintended consequences, and ISPs have been secretive about their workings for fear that subscribers will circumvent them. The Federal Communications Commission sanctioned Comcast Corp. last year for secretly stifling one particular form of traffic without telling subscribers.

One of the diagnostic tools on the M-Lab site, created by researchers in Germany, is specifically designed to detect interference of the kind that Comcast employed but has since abandoned.

Another tool is designed to detect whether certain types of traffic are being slowed. Cox Communications, the country's third-largest cable company, said this week it will test a system that temporarily slows some data to let more time-sensitive traffic through. That prompted skepticism from consumer groups that favor "Net Neutrality," which is the principle of equal treatment of Internet traffic.

Google spokesman Dan Martin said M-Lab's tools "could help users understand their connections, and would allow researchers to validate and explore what Cox is doing."

The search engine company will provide 36 servers in 12 locations around the world, and will cover the bandwidth costs. Its partners are the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan think tank, and the PlanetLab Consortium, which runs network experiments for researchers but lacks the capacity for large-scale testing by consumers.

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Link to their site if you want to check it out: http://www.measurementlab.net/

My results from the fist test (hand copied- it uses Java)
Your PC is connected to a cable/ DSL modem (I have a cable connection)
Running 10s outbound test (client to server [C2S]) 922 kb/s
Running 10s inbound test (server to client [S2C]) 9.3mb/s
Information: [S2C]- packet queuing detected

Click on "More Details" and it gives you a long list of numbers (I have no idea what any of it means- maybe it will to some of you). At the bottom of that it adds :

The theoretical network limit is 18.94 Mbps
The NDT server has a 16384 KByte buffer which limits the throughput to 4607.21 Mbps
Your PC/ Workstation has a 64 KByte buffer which limits the throughput to 9.02 Mbps
The network based flow control limits the throughput to 14.23 Mbps.

Client Data reports link is "T1", Client Acks report link is "T1"
Server Data reports link is "Ethernet". Service Acks report link is "Ethernet".

Is this considered good? Not sure what all that means.

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