Measurement Lab, Google want to help Africans measure their internet quality

There are loads of people who are concerned about how much internet access Africa has. In trying to address that concern it’s also easy to forget that we should also be thinking about the quality of internet the continent is getting.

To help fill this information gap, the Measurement Lab Research Consortium (M-Lab) has launched its first locations in Africa, in partnership with TENET in South Africa, and KENET in Kenya, Google Africa, and many other industry and academic partners.

According to Google, M-Lab is a collaborative effort to provide a global, publicly available source of data on network performance. M-Lab takes a completely open approach, managing a global server platform designed specifically for network measurement. Researchers deploy open-source measurement tools on the platform, and users can run these tools to find out real-time information about their connection, such as speed, traffic shaping, and application throttling. Each time a test is run using one of these tools, data is collected. Currently M-Lab makes over 700 terabytes of raw, rich measurement data available to anyone who’s interested.

Data is now being collected on African networks in South Africa and Kenya via local servers for the first time, says Google, “providing a new and valuable source of information about the health and performance of the Internet in Africa”.

The idea is that the research can be used by regulators, academics, and everyday users who are interested in getting better data about connectivity and the quality of connectivity.

Examples of existing research informed by M-Lab infrastructure include the FCC’s Measuring Broadband America report in the US, a number of peer-reviewed academic papers, including primary research on deep packet Inspection, traffic shaping, and traffic discrimination.

If you’re interested, you can have a look at some of the data yourself.