Bringing Transparency to the Internet (original) (raw)

The goal of our Glasnost project is to make access networks, such as residential cable, DSL, and cellular broadband networks, more transparent to their customers.

ISPs are increasingly deploying a variety of middleboxes (e.g., firewalls, traffic shapers, censors, and redirectors) to monitor and to manipulate the performance of user applications. Most ISPs do not reveal the details of their network deployments to their customers. We believe that this knowledge is important to help users make a more informed choice of their ISP. Further, such knowledge is also useful for researchers designing protocols and systems that run on top of these networks.

To improve network transparency, we are building online tools that are easy to use and publishing them on this web page. Currently, there are two tools you could use to test your ISP. We will release more tools as we develop them in the future.

We previously provided a tool to measure various broadband characteristics. We since then discontinued this tool. You can still access information aboutour research on characterizing broadband networks.

If you are interested in learning more about our research in residential broadband networks or if you have questions or feedback, you can contact us via e-mail: