While bandwidth prices are slowly declining it is still quite common that some Internet Providers try to influence the traffic consumption of their customers by manipulating, which usually means artificially reducing, transfer speeds. Up until recently customers had little possibilities to detect traffic shaping. The Internet connection speed analysis provided by the tool collection at M-Lab, Measurement Lab, tries to give consumers the tools at to identify connection problems.
Measurement Lab was founded by the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google Inc. and academic researchers. It provides access to five tools some of which have been mentioned earlier at Ghacks. The tools in question are:
- Network Diagnostic Tool – Test your connection speed and receive sophisticated diagnosis of problems limiting speed.
- Glasnost – Test whether BitTorrent is being blocked or throttled.
- Network Path and Application Diagnosis – Diagnose common problems that impact last-mile broadband networks.
- DiffProbe (coming soon) -Determine whether an ISP is giving some traffic a lower priority than other traffic.
- NANO (coming soon) -Determine whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations.
Only three of the tools are currently accessible on the M-Lab website. The Internet connection speed analysis can be directly initiated on the website without having to install third party software programs. The only requirement is the latest Java Runtime Environment to be able to run the diagnostics.
Each analysis provides results and the means to interpret those results. To achieve best results a server closest to you should be chosen. The speed analysis provides the means to identify problems with the connection or certain protocols.
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If you detect that your Internet Provider is limiting your connection speed, so what? There aint a gattdam thing you can do about it.
Well it depends. I live in a place where we can select from dozens of Internet Providers and it is easy to change to another one. If you live in a rural area or somewhere where one Internet Provider has a monopoly it could be problematic.
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