Inspiring Work of Broadband Advocates and Researchers at the Michigan Broadband Summit
The first annual Michigan Broadband Summit was held on Sept. 24, 2019, sponsored by the MERIT research and education network, and it was my pleasure to attend on behalf of M-Lab. 
The gathering was an opportunity to learn more about the amazing work that MERIT, industry, municipalities, cooperatives, school districts and others are doing to improve internet access and service quality in Michigan. I came away inspired by every conversation and presentation, with the keynote from Francella Ochillo from Next Century Cities, and the MERIT team’s presentation of the Moonshot framework being particularly moving.
NDT Dataset - 2 Billion Rows and Growing
While we’ve been hard at work this year on the M-Lab 2.0 Platform Upgrade and Global Pilot, the number of people all over the world runing NDT tests has continued to grow. We collected 2 billion total NDT results between 2009-01-01 and the beginning of the second quarter of 2019, and we are on track to add 500 million just from April through September of this year! We now regularly exceed 3 million NDT tests per day, compared with 2.4 million per day at the end of the first quarter of 2019, 1 million per day two years ago, and 50k per day four years ago.
New Traceroute Table and Schema Now Available
To make our traceroute data in BigQuery more useful, researchers have sought an easy way to reconstruct the path of hops for the same test. This task was particularly hard because the schema, which was designed many years ago, put the hops of the same test in different rows.
To address this need from many of our partners and researchers, M-Lab is delighted to announce that the traceroute BigQuery table in the aggregate dataset is now available to the public. The new traceroute schema has one test per row, and all hops for a single test are inside the same row.
M-Lab 2.0 Platform: Global Pilot Entry
For a while, we’ve been developing M-Lab 2.0 [1, 2]. This month, we are launching a global pilot for the new software stack. The changes include:
- Stock Linux 4.19 LTS kernels with modern TCP and Cubic congestion control
- Standard instrumentation for all experiments using tcp-info
- Virtualization and container management using Kubernetes and Docker
- Reimplementation of the NDT server
Update to M-Lab Policies
Earlier this month, M-Lab published updates to our policies after completing a comprehensive review to ensure our compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and in preparation for the M-Lab 2.0 platform modernization update that will be rolled out this fall. This post outlines the changes and additions to our policies for the general public, for experiment developers hosting tests on the M-Lab platform, and for partners who provide hosting for M-Lab servers.