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.
How Measurement Lab’s Open Data can be used during COVID-19
Measurement Lab’s dataset is free, open, and full of data for Internet researchers to study how the Internet is performing under the increased COVID-19 related Internet usage. The DataStudio dashboards below correspond to the internal monitoring metrics we posted last week. They show data about test rate and median download speeds as COVID-19 increased its impact globally.
Changes Related to COVID-19
As COVID-19’s impact increases globally, more people are working, learning and living online. Internet infrastructure is critical in these moments. The user-initiated measurements collected by M-Lab provide an opportunity to understand whether our shared infrastructure can handle the unprecedented shift of load to the network’s edges. The following is a snapshot analysis of how our platform’s traffic has shifted in the last three weeks. We will follow up with DataStudio dashboards using our public data set soon.
As these dashboards will show, the benefit of open data is that anyone can access it, use it, and reproduce research done with it. If you are using or would like to use M-Lab data in your response to the Internet’s performance during COVID-19, please let us know!
Digital Inclusion @ Home Announcement
As COVID-19’s impact increases globally, more people are working, learning and living online. In partnership with NDIA, X-Lab, ILSR and Marconi Society, Measurement Lab has set up a speed test portal to collect geolocated data with an accompanying survey focused on Digital Inclusion @ Home.
New Traceroute Binary on M-Lab platform
M-Lab has always committed to provide traceroute data for the tests running on M-Lab platform. Since we launched new platform in 2019 Q4, the new traceroute binary, Scamper, replaced Paris Traceroute on all our servers. Our BigQuery table for traceroute now has unified schema to cover both the legacy Paris Traceroute test data and new Scamper data. This blog is to analyze the difference between the legacy data and new data.