What is Measurement Lab?

Open Internet Measurement

When your Internet connection doesn’t work as expected, how can you tell whether the problem is caused by your connection, the application or something else? Answering this question and others like it is surprisingly difficult. That is where Measurement Lab comes in.

M-Lab is a consortium of research, industry and public-interest partners dedicated to:

• Providing an open, verifiable measurement platform for global network performance
• Hosting the largest open Internet performance dataset on the planet
• Creating visualizations and tools to help people make sense of Internet performance

Why Measurement Lab?

Real science requires verifiable processes, and M-Lab welcomes scientific collaboration and scrutiny. This is why all of the data collected by M-Lab’s global measurement platform is openly available, and all of the measurement tools hosted by M-Lab are open source. Anyone with the time and skill can review and improve the underlying methodologies and assumptions on which M-Lab’s platform, tools, and data rely. Transparency and review are key to good science, and good science is key to good measurement.

An Open Platform for Researchers

M-Lab assists scientific research by providing widely distributed servers and ample connectivity for researchers’ use. Each researcher-developed test is allocated dedicated resources on the M-Lab platform to facilitate accurate measurements. Server-side tools are openly licensed and operated, allowing third parties to develop their own client-side measurement software.

Better Open Data for Everyone

All data collected via M-Lab are made available to the public, allowing researchers and anyone else to build on a common pool of network measurement information.