Projects Overview and Impact#

M-Lab’s projects contribute to a growing global effort to better understand how the Internet performs in practice. 

We have three flagship projects that represent the areas of work we focus on:

• Applied Data and Research: The Internet Quality Barometer
• Community Building: The Open Measurement Gatherings
• Measurement Infrastructure: Bring Your Own Server

These projects expand the reach of the M-Lab platform and help translate measurement data into insights that support research, policy, and infrastructure development.

Applied Data and Research#

All data collected through M-Lab tests is made publicly available. This open approach enables the study of Internet infrastructure and connectivity trends across regions and networks which can then be applied to solve connectivity challenges.

The Internet Quality Barometer (IQB) is an initiative to redefine how we measure and understand Internet performance to keep pace with evolving technological demands and user expectations.

Director, Technical Lead, Pavlos Sermpezis presents the IQB Framework at the 2025 Pulse Research week in Barcelona.

Past Projects: 

• Broadband Mapping

These projects use M-Lab’s measurement tools and datasets to better understand Internet access, network performance, and connectivity gaps around the world.

Community Building#

M-Lab also contributes to a global community of researchers and technologists working on Internet measurement. 

The Open Measurement Gathering (OMG) was a series of convenings that brought together four open Internet and censorship measurement organizations — Measurement Lab (M-Lab), Censored Planet, IODA (Internet Outage Detection and Analysis), and OONI (Open Observatory of Network Interference) — to build deeper trust, coordination, and collaboration.

Through community building initiatives the platform helps foster collaboration, knowledge sharing, and the development of new measurement tools. Learn more about how to get involved with the M-Lab Community. 

Measurement Infrastructure#

Through its distributed infrastructure, M-Lab enables Internet performance tests to be run by users and integrated into websites and applications around the world. 

In particular, the Bring Your Own Server project seeks to further diversify the measurement platform to create a global open source measurement infrastructure. Partners can contribute physical or virtual servers that they manage and joining an open source federated measurement platform.