Google's Vint Cerf touts broadband measurement tools

Google and the New America Foundation unveiled a new set of tools that depict broadband availability and performance across the globe at an event in Washington.

Google chief Internet evangelist Vint Cerf took the stage to show off new visualization tools that he said would help researchers make sense of the mountain of data. Cerf said the goal is to understand broadband experiences across the U.S. and internationally without relying on advertised speeds. "There are lots of assertions about broadband rankings that are often not very quantitative," Cerf said. "We're interested in making those more crisp and understandable by getting solid data behind everything." The search giant teamed up with researchers in 2009 to create Measurement Lab (M-Lab), an open-source set of broadband measurement tools; since then the project has conducted more than half a billion tests and generated 300 terabytes of data. The data is collected from computers across the globe conducting tests using the M-Lab platform and downloaded to Google servers. Cerf emphasized that Google is simply hosting the data and has made it publicly available.

Please see New America Foundation press release:
http://newamerica.net/pressroom/2011/more_than_a_broadband_map_0