Accessible M-Lab NDT data for Internet Performance research during COVID-19
In response to increased reliance on the Internet during the COVID-19 pandemic Measurement Lab, with the support of Internet Society, is dedicated to making our NDT data more accessible so everyone with an interest in Internet Performance can use our data in their research. We started with a visualization of test count and median download speeds in New York, India, and Sao Paulo as an example of what data was available to researchers through BigQuery.
NDT Unified Views Now Published
In November 2019, M-Lab reached a milestone after upgrading the operating system, virtualization, and TCP measurement instrumentation running on our servers worldwide. The upgrade also included a completely re-written ndt-server, providing backward compatibility to old clients, as well as the new ndt7 protocol. With the change in system architecture and the changes to ndt-server, our team wanted to provide unified, longitudinal views of the data in BigQuery that embed the provenance for all tests.
New FQDNs for Experiments
If you have integrated NDT into a client that does not use our Locate Service, please be aware of the following change. If your NDT client uses our Locate Service, you should not notice a change.
Fully Qualified Domain Names for M-Lab experiments will be changing soon.
NDT JavaScript Integrations - Update to Include Recent Client Bug Fix
A bug fix was recently deployed to M-Lab’s NDT JavaScript client code resolving user support reports of consistently higher than expected upload measurements reported in the browser for tests run via speed.measurementlab.net. M-Lab recommends that any third parties who integrate the NDT test in JavaScript to check and/or update their client code if their integration is based on M-Lab’s JavaScript test in the speed.measurementlab.net codebase.
Recent updates regarding the SamKnows experiment
Measurement Lab (M-Lab) has been a supportive partner of the FCC’s Measuring Broadband America program since its beginning due to the program’s commitment to openness, open data and transparency which aligns closely with M-Lab’s mission around open data and open source internet measurement. Measurement Lab began hosting the SamKnows server-side measurement tools in 2009.
As of February 14, 2020, Measurement Lab is unable to host the SamKnows experiment due to SamKnows’ decision to not comply with M-Lab’s long-standing open source requirements. To ensure and encourage transparency for the MBA program, we are publishing this post to document the timeline leading up to that decision.