M-Lab, OONI, IIJ, Dioptra Research Group, Cloudflare Radar, Reverse Traceroute, and IODA hosted the Open Measurement Hackathon, October 31, 2025, following the ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2025 in Madison, Wisconsin, USA.

Back in 2019, I wrote about how to install the open source ndt-server that M-Lab uses, on a server of your own. Our goal is that others can use M-Lab's tools to measure their own networks. This post is an update, with a couple more features.

In this second “analysis recommendations in context” post, we will explore the refined research questions from the first post, resulting from our discussion of how to design specific questions with understanding of available data source(s) and the context of what each contains. We emphasized the ...

A while back, our team published some analysis recommendations for anyone working with our data from the Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT), comparing it to other Internet measurement data sets, and drawing conclusions or inferences about the data. These recommendations are intended to provide guidanc...

When thinking about broadband in the United States, the first thing people likely think about is whether their connection is fast enough-- are they getting the speeds they need to do business, go to school, etc. The dominance of “speed” in assessing broadband service goes all the way to the top- ...

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration’s (NTIA) recently released a new public map, the [Indicators of Broadband Need][ntia]. Pulling together different sources of data in this excellent, publicly available resource is helpful to communities as they plan how and where to i...

In our recent [roadmap post][roadmap], we shared a list of milestones that the team is working on this and last quarter. Our Datatype migration and Standardized Columns milestone references the [gardener service][gardener], which maintains and reprocesses M-Lab data, as well as the [UUID annotato...

Baltimore Data Day is an annual conference bringing together “community leaders, nonprofit organizations, government and civic-minded technologists to explore trends in community-based data and learn how other groups are using data to support and advance constructive change.” Th...

Following the [general availability of the ndt7 protocol][ndt7intro], we will be working with NDT client integrators to support their migration to ndt7. As they do, the NDT dataset will shift from predominantly ndt5 to predominantly ndt7. As part of assessing our readiness for this larger effort,...

OONI was recently invited to participate in a NetGain Partnership webinar (titled “Surging Demand and The Global Internet Infrastructure”) to discuss the changing landscape for internet infrastructure and technology in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. As part...

Following the M-Lab platform upgrade in Nov. 2019, the development team began a series of follow up projects to enable access to NDT data for various audiences with differing needs. The first step in that process was the publication of "unified views", which present the most commonly used fields ...

The M-Lab team completed a major platform upgrade in November 2019, which required publication of NDT data to new BigQuery tables and views. Consequently, the aggregate NDT data presented on our visualization website has not been updated. We're pleased to report that the M-Lab data visualization ...

In November 2019, M-Lab reached a milestone after upgrading the operating system, virtualization, and TCP measurement instrumentation running on our servers worldwide. The upgrade also included a completely re-written ndt-server, providing backward compatibility to old clients, as well as the new...

A bug fix was recently deployed to M-Lab's NDT JavaScript client code resolving user support reports of consistently higher than expected upload measurements reported in the browser for tests run via speed.measurementlab.net. M-Lab recommends that any third parties who integrate the NDT test in J...

If you've been following our blog over the last few months, you know M-Lab has been working toward a complete server platform upgrade. As of November 20, 2019, all M-Lab servers are now managed by Kubernetes, running Docker container services for all experiments. This transition has greatly impro...

If you've followed the M-Lab blog over the past year and a half, you'll know that we've been engineering and testing a massive upgrade to our server software and how it's managed and deployed [1] [2] [3] [4]. That's been a ton of work, and our team is excited to now complete the migration...

Last week M-Lab was honored to attend and contribute at the 2019 Indigenous Connectivity Summit (ICS), presented by Internet Society, in Hilo, Hawai'i; and a community network training and building event in the soverign lands of indigenous Hawaiian people, Pu'u...

The first annual Michigan Broadband Summit was held on Sept. 24, 2019, sponsored by the MERIT research and education network, and it was my pleasure to attend on behalf of M-Lab. The gathering was an opportunity to learn more about the amazing work that MERIT, ind...

While we've been hard at work this year on the M-Lab 2.0 Platform Upgrade and Global Pilot, the number of people all over the world runing NDT tests has continued to grow. We collected 2 billion total NDT results between 2009-01-01 and the beginning of the second quarter of 2019, and we are on tr...

Earlier this month, M-Lab published updates to our policies after completing a comprehensive review to ensure our compliance with the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and in preparation for the M-Lab 2.0 platform modernization update that will be rolled out this fall. This post outlin...

M-Lab was pleased to be invited to contribute to the Internet Measurements workshop at the [2019 African Internet Summit][ais2019], June 15-16, 2019 in Kampala, Uganda. M-Lab tech lead, Peter Boothe, and advisor, Georgia Bullen, presented a hands-on tutorial on querying and visualizing performanc...

M-Lab is excited to highlight the launch of "Michigan Moonshot", a pilot data collection project developed through a partnership with the MERIT Network, Michigan State University’s Quello Center, and M-Lab. We worked with MERIT developers who adapted the Piecew...

If you’ve clicked on the Visualizations page on our website in the last year or so, and tried to find recent data for any location, you’ve likely been disappointed. TLDR; - Our visualization site is BACK! Continue reading to learn more..

Over the past few years, M-Lab has supported an increasing number of local communities, municipalities, regional coalitions, and others who are interested in understanding the state of broadband service in their area. In every case, communities come to M-Lab because of the openness of our data. C...

In December 2017, M-Lab was notified of oddities in the Paris Traceroute data, which we then wrote about in January 2018. Upon investigation, a bug in the Paris Traceroute code was identified. The bug caused bad measurement data in 2.7% of the traceroutes since July 2016.

M-Lab had the pleasure of attending the first ever SIGCOMM hackathon on August 25, 2018, at the Nokia Skypark headquarters in Budapest, Hungary. The hackathon, sponsored by Nokia, DECIX, and Netflix, invited network research faculty, students, and industry professionals from around the world to f...

Since May 2017, the M-Lab team has been working on an updated, open source pipeline, which pulls raw data from our servers, saves it to Google Cloud Storage, and then parses it into our BigQuery tables. The team is particularly excited about this update because it means that the pipeline no longe...

When the M-Lab platform was initially launched in 2009, the software and operating system running on our servers used the best available boot management, virtualization, and kernel-level measurement instrumentation available. In the years since M-Lab’s initial launch, the state of system administ...

In December 2017, M-Lab was notified of oddities in the Paris Traceroute data. Upon investigation, a bug in the Paris Traceroute code was identified. The bug caused bad measurement data in 2.7% of the traceroutes since July 2016.

M-Lab data is collected from distributed experiments hosted on servers all over the world, processed in a pipeline, and published for free in both raw and parsed (structured) formats. The back end processing component for this has served us well for many years, but it's been showing its age recen...

Today, M-Lab is happy to announce the public beta of new M-Lab BigQuery tables. These tables provide substantially improved performance and reduce the difficulty of writing BigQuery SQL.

On Thursday Nov. 6, Collin Anderson gave a talk at the RIPE meeting in London. Collin has been immersed in the M-Lab data for some time, and helped lead the recently published technical report, ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Perform...

We launched the M-Lab Internet Observatory last week to provide a window into ISP performance, letting people see how ISPs in the US are doing compared to each other, and to view the way in which the connections between ISPs impact performance. We will be releasing additional features and views a...

We are happy to announce the release of a long-term collaborative research effort using M-Lab's data to understand how interconnection impacts end-user performance. The report, ISP Interconnection and its Impact on Consumer Internet Performance examines years of network measurement...

The Open Technology Institute hosted students from the Graduate School of Information at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, March 3-7, 2014 for an Alternative Spring Break program. Two students met with key internal staff interested using M-Lab data to help answer broad research...