On Wednesday, Google with two other non-profit organisations (New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute (OTI) and the PlanetLab Consortium) has launched a website exclusively for the customers to check their internet connections and their performance. They are basically launched for the comforts of the customers and for them to check how their internet connections would perform in different instances like data congestion and to see how they manage the traffic. This lab is called the Measurement Lab. Google will be placing 36 servers in 12 different locations all over the world. At the moment, M-lab is in proof of concept stage but later when deployed would have three tools on every three servers.
The daily operations of the system would be taken care by PlanetLab and would also serve as a point of contact. Other coordination activities between the ISPs and the researchers would be taken care by Open Technology Institute (OTI).
The site in fact talks about the need that is there for the students to know and learn about the actual functionality and performance of the internet. It is basically studying about what actually the internet does to connect with the internet highway in the network and how exactly it transfers information from systems all over the world connecting the server in a remote location to the customers’ how computers.
The internet service providers are saying that they regularly have to check the network connectivity in order to make sure that the usage of few of their customers who use their service heavily do not slow down the connectivity of their customers who use the internet connection sparingly. This is the reason why they have many traffic management techniques that they keep it secret in order to avoid misuse of the service by customers. Comcast Corp., an internet service provider, was authorized by the Federal Communications Commission for sorting out a particular type of traffic with out actually informing the customers. Measurement Lab that has been developed by German researchers also have some modules specifically developed to check the interferences like these.
There are certain other modules to detect if the service providers are favouring few customers considering them as more time sensitive traffic and slowing down the remaining traffic. This phase of testing is considered serious and checked as this act of the service providers would totally be against ’Net Neutrality’ based on which all the customers should be treated equally without any bias. There is information saying that Cox Communications, a leading ISP in the United States, is planning of testing some system this week to check on how such high sensitive traffic can be given higher priority and channelled.
Dan Martin, Google spokesperson, talking said M-Lab’s tools has said, “could help users understand their connections, and would allow researchers to validate and explore what Cox is doing.”