How to leverage Measurement Lab Internet metrics to get useful insights through Data Science

Phillipa Gill, Christophe Diot, Lai Yi Ohlsen, Matt Mathis, and Stephen Soltesz

on which researchers have deployed measurement tools. Its mission is to measure the Internet, save the data and make it universally accessible and useful. This paper serves as an update on the MLab platform 10+ years after its initial introduction to the research community. Here, we detail the current state of the M-Lab distributed platform, highlights existing measurements/data available on the platform, and describes opportunities for further engagement between the networking research community and the platform.

Udit Paul, Jiamo Liu, Mengyang Gu, Arpit Gupta, Elizabeth Belding

Crowdsourced speed test measurements, such as those by Ookla® and Measurement Lab (M-Lab), offer a critical view of network access and performance from the user's perspective. However, we argue that taking these measurements at surface value is problematic. It is essential to contextualize these measurements to understand better what the attained upload and download speeds truly measure. To this end, we develop a novel Broadband Subscription Tier (BST) methodology that associates a speed test data point with a residential broadband subscription plan. Our evaluation of this methodology with the FCC's MBA dataset shows over 96% accuracy. We augment approximately 1.5M Ookla and M-Lab speed test measurements from four major U.S. cities with the BST methodology. We show that many low-speed data points are attributable to lower-tier subscriptions and not necessarily poor access. Then, for a subset of the measurement sample (80k data points), we quantify the impact of access link type (WiFi or wired), WiFi spectrum band and RSSI (if applicable), and device memory on speed test performance. Interestingly, we observe that measurement time of day only marginally affects the reported speeds. Finally, we show that the median throughput reported by Ookla speed tests can be up to two times greater than M-Lab measurements for the same subscription tier, city, and ISP due to M-Lab's employment of different measurement methodologies. Based on our results, we put forward a set of recommendations for both speed test vendors and the FCC to con-textualize speed test data points and correctly interpret measured performance.

Akshath Jain, Deepayan Patra, Peijing Xu, Justine Sherry, Phillipa Gill

On February 24, 2022, Russia began a large-scale invasion of Ukraine, the first widespread conflict in a country with high levels of network penetration. Because the Internet was designed with resilience under warfare in mind, the war in Ukraine offers the networking community a unique opportunity to evaluate whether and to what extent this design goal has been realized. We provide an early glimpse at Ukrainian network resilience over 54 days of war using data from Measurement Lab's Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT). We find that NDT users' network performance did indeed degrade - e.g. with average packet loss rates increasing by as much as 500% relative to pre-wartime baselines in some regions - and that the intensity of the degradation correlated with the presence of Russian troops in the region. Performance degradation also correlated with changes in traceroute paths; we observed an increase in path diversity and significant changes to routing decisions at Ukrainian border Autonomous Systems (ASes) post-invasion. Overall, the use of diverse and changing paths speaks to the resilience of the Internet's underlying routing algorithms, while the correlated degradation in performance highlights a need for continued efforts to ensure usability and stability during war.