This comes straight from Google. In collaboration with the New America Foundation‘s Open Technology Institute and the PlanetLab Consortium, Google has launched Measurement Lab. Measurement Lab (M-Lab) is an open platform that you can use to test your internet connection. Though there are tools already available in the market that can help you with such needs but most of them do not provide an accurate description of the problem. Mainly because of the lack of widely-distributed servers with ample connectivity.
Acc. to the post from Official Google Blog:
M-Lab aims to address these problems. Over the course of early 2009, Google will provide researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations in the U.S. and Europe. All data collected via M-Lab will be made publicly available for other researchers to build on. M-Lab is intended to be a truly community-based effort, and we welcome the support of other companies, institutions, researchers, and users that want to provide servers, tools, or other resources that can help the platform flourish.
As of now there are three tools available:
Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) provides a sophisticated speed and diagnostic test. An NDT test reports more than just the upload and download speeds — it also attempts to determine what, if any, problems limited these speeds, differentiating between computer configuration and network infrastructure problems. While the diagnostic messages are most useful for expert users, they can also help novice users by allowing them to provide detailed trouble reports to their network administrator.
Glasnost attempts to detect whether your Internet access provider is performing application-specific traffic shaping. Currently, you can test if your ISP is throttling or blocking BitTorrent. Tests for other applications will follow soon.
Network Path and Application Diagnosis
NPAD diagnoses some of the common problems effecting the last network mile and end-users’ systems. These are the most common causes of all performance problems on wide area network paths.
There are other tools like DiffProbe (To determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic) and NANO (To determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations) that are in pipeline.
Coming from Google we can be assured of reliability of these tools. I had faced this issue in the past and I can tell you it becomes quite annoying when neither you nor your ISP, webhost are able to pinpoint the source of error. It took me a lot of time dealing with my webhost , DNS and ISP to sort out this issue.
Great initiative from Google! Don’t forget to bookmark this site.
Ankur Jain is a Software Engineer in Test Automation. After a 5 years stint with Accenture and Oracle, he started his eLearning company. A long-time blogger and proud owner of the "Learn" series of websites. 