Calling all researchers - M-Lab data now available on Amazon EC2

We're happy to announce that Amazon Web Services is partnering with us to make M-Lab's broadband data publicly available. Anyone is allowed make use of this information without restriction, under a "no rights reserved" Creative Commons Zero waiver.

Data collected through the NDT and NPAD tools are currently available. These tools measure the speed of a user's Internet connection, as well as a number of other aspects of a connection test between the user's computer and an M-Lab server. They also attempt to identify certain problems that might be impairing the performance of the connection. We have over 150,000 archived test results already, and we're now seeing thousands of tests per day.

Amazon EC2 is providing free hosting for M-Lab data as part of the Amazon Public Data Sets program. Using EC2, interested researchers can access the data, and then purchase storage and computational capacity to analyze the datasets or transfer them elsewhere. If you use the data in your research, we'd love to hear what you find -- please contact the M-Lab steering committee to let us know, or to share any other questions, comments or requests. Details about how the logs are structured can be found here

It's one of M-Lab's core goals to create an open and publicly available source of better broadband data for all researchers to analyze. As more tests are run, we will make the new results available, and data collected through other tools' available will also be made available in the future.

M-Lab is a community-based effort that depends on the support of partners like Amazon Web Services, and we'd welcome the support of other data repositories as well. We want to provide researchers with multiple ways to access the data, making that as cheap, easy, and useful as possible.

We also want to make this data more intelligible to end users, as these datasets are simply in a raw, unprocessed form. Let us know if you want to get involved to achieve that goal, or participate in M-Lab in other ways, such as by deploying tools or providing servers.