About
M-Lab's Mission
M-Lab aims to advance Internet research by empowering consumers with useful information about their Internet performance. By providing free, open Internet measurement data, researchers, regulators, advocacy groups, and the general public can get a better sense of how the Internet is working for them, and how to maintain and improve it for the future.
Open Internet Measurement
When the Internet fails, most people are left guessing why.
Measurement Lab exists to change that.
M-Lab is a global, open source project that makes Internet performance transparent. It offers a verifiable measurement platform, maintains one of the world’s largest open datasets on network performance, and creates tools that help people understand and improve how the Internet works.
Why M-Lab?
Rigorous scientific research depends on transparency and verifiable methods. M-Lab is designed with this principle at its core, actively encouraging collaboration, review, and scrutiny.
All data collected through M-Lab’s global measurement platform is openly available, and all associated tools are open source. This allows researchers, practitioners, and the wider public to examine, validate, and improve the methodologies and assumptions that underpin the platform.
By prioritizing transparency and peer review, M-Lab supports more reliable measurement and, in turn, a deeper and more accurate understanding of how the Internet performs.
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 is made publicly available. M-Lab's historical data archive provides a common pool of historical network measurement information that anyone may use and serves as a data source enabling consumers, operators, regulators, researchers, and civil society to understand the state and quality of the Internet.
Our Story
The history of M-Lab
M-Lab was founded in 2009 by New America's Open Technology Institute, the PlanetLab Consortium, Google, and a group of academic researchers.
The project grew out of conversations begun in 2008 by Vint Cerf, one of the “fathers of the Internet,” who spoke with Internet researchers to better understand the challenges they faced when studying Internet performance.
Researchers identified several key obstacles, including the lack of widely deployed servers with sufficient connectivity to support large-scale Internet measurement experiments. They also reported difficulties sharing large datasets with one another. At the same time, there was no public resource capable of providing combined performance data to policymakers or to consumers interested in understanding how their Internet performance changed over time.
M-Lab was created in response to these challenges, with the goal of addressing the core barriers researchers faced and promoting large-scale, open-source measurement of the Internet.