M-Lab Knowledge Base Browse All Articles
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Methods, tools, and best practices for using M-Lab's open datasets in academic research, policy analysis, and community broadband advocacy.
Why download speed alone is an incomplete picture of internet performance, and how M-Lab measures latency, packet loss, and working internet quality.
A practical guide to loading, filtering, and visualising M-Lab Monthly Stats parquet files in Python using pandas, without needing BigQuery or a Google Cloud account.
How to access M-Lab's raw NDT7 data in Google Cloud Storage using gsutil or gcloud without permission errors.
How to use the M-Lab Locate Service API to verify your node's probability setting and registration status.
Recommended Prometheus metrics endpoints and Docker logging configuration to prevent disk exhaustion on M-Lab BYOS nodes.
Steps to diagnose and fix a stopped or unresponsive register-node component in a Docker BYOS deployment.
How to fix an M-Lab BYOS node that is unreachable due to a mismatch between the env file IP and the server's actual public IP.
M-Lab enforces 40 tests per day per IP address. Learn what this means and how to work within the limit.
How to get free access to M-Lab's BigQuery datasets, run your first queries, understand the data structure, and work efficiently with large tables.
A guide for digital rights advocates, community broadband organizers, and civil society researchers using M-Lab data to document ISP behavior, support communities, and make evidence-based arguments.
A guide for policymakers, regulators, and government staff who want to use M-Lab data to understand broadband performance, inform policy decisions, and evaluate connectivity programs.
A guide for ISP engineers, network operators, and IXP staff who want to understand M-Lab data from their networks, host a measurement node, or use M-Lab for network diagnostics and performance benchmarking.
A curated starting path for academic researchers and data scientists using M-Lab data — covering data access, key datasets, measurement methodology, and common research patterns.
How to embed M-Lab's open source tests in a website, mobile app, or software product — and how integration partners can contribute infrastructure back to the M-Lab community.
What the Monthly Stats dataset is, how it's derived from NDT measurements, what the parquet files contain, and how to access them without BigQuery.
How M-Lab annotates measurements with geographic and network metadata, the accuracy and limitations of each annotation type, and how to use them correctly in analysis.
MSAK is M-Lab's configurable multi-stream throughput and UDP latency measurement service — designed for researchers and developers who need more control than single-stream NDT provides.
NDT is M-Lab's flagship speed test — it measures single-stream download and upload throughput, latency, and provides TCP-level diagnostics for every test.
DASH emulates a video streaming player to measure how well a network connection supports adaptive video streaming, without relying on a real video platform.
M-Lab's packet-headers service captures TCP packet headers for every connection on the M-Lab platform, stored as per-flow .pcap files indexed by UUID.
How to interpret percentile columns in M-Lab Monthly Stats data, including the counterintuitive polarity of latency and loss, and what p50 vs p95 tells you.
Reverse Traceroute reconstructs the network path from an M-Lab server back to a client — the direction that standard traceroute cannot see — using a distributed system of vantage points and spoofed probes.
An overview of M-Lab's Bring Your Own Server program — what it is, what's required, and how hosting a node contributes to global internet measurement.
TCP INFO collects detailed TCP socket statistics from the Linux kernel for every connection on the M-Lab platform, capturing congestion control state, RTT, loss, and dozens of other metrics at regular intervals.
M-Lab's Traceroute core service automatically runs a network path measurement from every M-Lab server back to the client for every TCP connection, building a continuous record of Internet routing.
Steps to take when an M-Lab test takes too long, fails to start, or never completes.
Why different speed tests produce different results, and what those differences reveal about your internet connection.
WeHe tests whether your ISP is treating traffic from specific apps (like YouTube or Spotify) differently from other traffic — detecting throttling or blocking on a per-application basis.
An introduction to what M-Lab is, what it measures, and how its open data can help you understand internet performance.
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