Measurement Observations on Network Performance During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Northern Italy
OONI was recently invited to participate in a NetGain Partnership webinar (titled “Surging Demand and The Global Internet Infrastructure”) to discuss the changing landscape for internet infrastructure and technology in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As part of our preparation for this webinar, we looked at network performance measurements collected from northern Italy over the last months (i.e. when Italy was hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic) in an attempt to understand whether and to what extent there was a correlation between increased internet use and reduced network performance. As our observations may be of public interest, we decided to share them through this blog post.
Long Term Supported Schemas Using Standardized BigQuery Columns
Following the M-Lab platform upgrade in Nov. 2019, the development team began a series of follow up projects to enable access to NDT data for various audiences with differing needs. The first step in that process was the publication of “unified views”, which present the most commonly used fields in NDT data, and only show tests that meet our current, best understanding of test completeness. This was one step toward Long Term Support of stable schemas for our tables and views in BigQuery. In other words, a lot of work is happening in the background to support long term support for standard BigQuery columns across all M-Lab datasets.
Data Visualization Site Upgrade
The M-Lab team completed a major platform upgrade in November 2019, which required publication of NDT data to new BigQuery tables and views. Consequently, the aggregate NDT data presented on our visualization website has not been updated. We’re pleased to report that the M-Lab data visualization site will soon be upgraded.
Accessible M-Lab NDT data for Internet Performance research during COVID-19
In response to increased reliance on the Internet during the COVID-19 pandemic Measurement Lab, with the support of Internet Society, is dedicated to making our NDT data more accessible so everyone with an interest in Internet Performance can use our data in their research. We started with a visualization of test count and median download speeds in New York, India, and Sao Paulo as an example of what data was available to researchers through BigQuery.
NDT Unified Views Now Published
In November 2019, M-Lab reached a milestone after upgrading the operating system, virtualization, and TCP measurement instrumentation running on our servers worldwide. The upgrade also included a completely re-written ndt-server, providing backward compatibility to old clients, as well as the new ndt7 protocol. With the change in system architecture and the changes to ndt-server, our team wanted to provide unified, longitudinal views of the data in BigQuery that embed the provenance for all tests.