Google Helping You to Measure Your Net Connection

Google has co-launched its measurement lab equipped with several tools that will help you in finding out problems with your internet connection. Glasnost and Network Diagnostic are two currently available tools. While Glasnost tests if BitTorrent is throttled, the other checks intenet connection speed.

Other programs like DiffProbe are expected to arrive in the future. It will determine if your internet service provider is giving lower priority to some traffic in comparison to other.

Open Technology Institute and the PlanetLab Consortium are two other founders of the Lab. For advancing the internet research, all the data collected through the M-Lab will be publicly accessible on servers that are currently provided by Google.

This is atleast a partly created initiative to deal with the net neutrality issues for providing better transparency to users. Although the step is more likely supporting the political interest of Google, but it will be interesting to see if same transparency is provided with issues like Google’s censorship in China, Germany and other countries. A measurement Lab tool will register the domains censored in Google.cn, and will collect those into the public database for the research work.