AARNET AND MEASUREMENT LAB BRING INCREASED TRANSPARENCY TO AUSTRALIA’S BROADBAND NETWORKS

Sydney, AUSTRALIA – 23 June 2010 – AARNet, Australia’s Academic and Research Network, is proud to announce the first deployment of Measurement Lab (M-Lab) servers in Australia, which will empower researchers and the public with tools to better understand the performance of broadband Internet connections. 

M-Lab is a pioneering technology platform that allows researchers to deploy network measurement tools around the world. By visiting measurementlab.net , Internet users can run these tools and test their Internet connection speeds, attempt to identify whether particular applications are being throttled, diagnose common problems affecting network connectivity, and measure their connections in other ways. All collected data is made publicly available for anyone to use and build on.

The Australian M-Lab servers were jointly provided by AARNet and Google Inc. This marks M-Lab’s first server outpost in Asia-Pacific, and by hosting servers in the region, this will facilitate more accurate, robust measurement.

The M-Lab project is led by a group of international researchers, with supporting resources provided by a number of companies and organisations around the world. In the last year, M-Lab has been used by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission and Greece’s telecom authority to begin studying broadband services.

Chris Hancock, CEO of AARNet said, “AARNet is pleased to be working with M-Lab, in partnership with Google, to improve the transparency of the Internet in this region by providing access to M-Lab diagnostic tools. This will be the first M-Lab server to be deployed in the Southern Hemisphere to serve users in the region. Users can now test their Internet speeds with a network diagnostic tool that is used by researchers and governments around the world for an independent verification on a networks’ connection speed.”

“With the M-Lab servers, AARNet expands this valuable platform by allowing data to be collected on the servers to be available to researchers and academics that have an interest in testing and deploying network diagnostic applications to advance the transparency and performance of the Internet.”

Phillip Grasso-Nguyen, Head of Network Engineering, Google Australia, said, “At Google, we’re big believers in the power of measurement. Transparency has always been crucial to the success of the Internet, and, by advancing network research and empowering users with more information, we hope that M-Lab will help sustain a healthy, innovative Internet.”

AARNet invites Australian users to take a look at the tools available on M-Lab, and to begin learning more about their own broadband connections by running the tests.

About AARNet
AARNet Pty Ltd (APL) is the company that operates Australia's Academic and Research Network (AARNet). It is a not-for-profit company limited by shares. The shareholders are 37 Australian universities and the CSIRO. AARNet provides high-capacity leading edge Internet services for the tertiary education and research sector communities and their research partners. AARNet serves more than one million end users who access the network through local area networks at member institutions. For further information, please visit: www.aarnet.edu.au.

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