New Tools to Measure Home Broadband Connections Now Available

"WASHINGTON, July 20, 2011 – Consumers now have a new way to capture and record actual data about the speeds and quality of their broadband service.

"Representatives from New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative (OTI), Google and Georgia Institute of Technology proclaimed the arrival Tuesday of Broadband Internet Service BenchMark (BISMark). BISMark is a project of M-Lab, a private sector-academia open-source technology collaboration. The technology uses consumer grade commercial wireless routers to capture data on a user’s broadband speed, and makes it available in the public domain for the user to analyze. Users can apply for a router through a link on ProjectBismark.com.

“With BISMark, users can expect continuous network measurements of their ISP performance, and very soon, a web page they can go to to explore these measurements,” said Nick Feamster, Associate Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology."

Broadband Breakfast

More information on BISMark and M-Lab can be found on ProjectBismark.net and MeasurementLab.net.