…At Google, we care deeply about sustaining the Internet as an open platform for consumer choice and innovation. No matter your views on net neutrality and ISP network management practices, everyone can agree that Internet users deserve to be well-informed about what they’re getting when they sign up for broadband, and good data is the bedrock of sound policy. Transparency has always been crucial to the success of the Internet …
Those were the closing statements of a recent post from the Official Google Blog discussing the launch of Google’s Measurement Lab. This new Google initiative is geared towards giving Internet users network-diagnostic information that would tell them of their network’s good or degrading performance. With the New American Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, PlanetLab consortium as well as other academic researchers backing it up, Measurement Lab hopes to make the said network performance indicator easier to share to anyone.
Google believes that everyone have the right to know how their network are performing, considering the fact that users pay their hard-earned money to subscribed to broadband network. Hence, they must have way of knowing whether they are getting bang for their bucks.
The Measurement Labs plans to grant researchers 36 servers in various locations in both the U.S. and UK. This will be given to them all through out the year. Google is also advertising Measurement Labs a community-based initiative so Google says that anyone is free to offer their support to make the initiative successful.
Google is kicking off M-Lab with three tools running on Google servers up for diagnosis by anyone. Developed by researchers, the three tools aim to help users obtain valuable information that would improve their network performance.
