Migrating NDT clients to ndt7
Following the general availability of the ndt7 protocol, we will be working with NDT client integrators to support their migration to ndt7. As they do, the NDT dataset will shift from predominantly ndt5 to predominantly ndt7. As part of assessing our readiness for this larger effort, a pilot was started on July 8.
Introducing ndt7
The new ndt7 protocol for the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) is now generally available on the M-Lab platform. Since 2009, NDT has been the premier TCP performance measurement service test hosted by M-Lab. During its history on the platform, NDT has produced the largest test volume to date, spanning the longest history. Since late 2018, M-Lab has worked with researcher Simone Basso to develop the ndt7 protocol and archival data format.
Measurement Observations on Network Performance During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Northern Italy
OONI was recently invited to participate in a NetGain Partnership webinar (titled “Surging Demand and The Global Internet Infrastructure”) to discuss the changing landscape for internet infrastructure and technology in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As part of our preparation for this webinar, we looked at network performance measurements collected from northern Italy over the last months (i.e. when Italy was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic) in an attempt to understand whether and to what extent there was a correlation between increased internet use and reduced network performance. As our observations may be of public interest, we decided to share them through this blog post.
Long Term Supported Schemas Using Standardized BigQuery Columns
Following the M-Lab platform upgrade in Nov. 2019, the development team began a series of follow up projects to enable access to NDT data for various audiences with differing needs. The first step in that process was the publication of “unified views”, which present the most commonly used fields in NDT data, and only show tests that meet our current, best understanding of test completeness. This was one step toward Long Term Support of stable schemas for our tables and views in BigQuery. In other words, a lot of work is happening in the background to support long term support for standard BigQuery columns across all M-Lab datasets.