Dear listers, 

A few weeks ago, Measurement Lab Research Consortium (M-Lab) launched one of its first locations in Africa, in partnership with KENET Kenya, Google Africa, and many other industry and academic partners.

M-Lab is a collaborative effort working to provide an open, global, publicly available source of data on network performance. To accomplish this M-Lab takes a completely open approach, managing a purpose-built global server platform designed specifically for network measurement. Researchers deploy open-source measurement tools on this platform, and each time a test is run using one of these tools, data is collected. Currently M-Lab makes over 700 terabytes of raw, rich measurement data available to anyone who’s interested.

M-Lab’s presence in Kenya (and also South Africa) mean that this data is now being collected on African networks, giving a new and valuable source of information about the health and performance of African infrastructure.

A more public launch will happen in a few weeks, for now I'm hoping to drive some initial research ahead of that and invite you to look into the data, and to access it here.

If you’re interested in learning more about M-Lab, please visit measurementlab.net. Finally, M-Lab has a full time staff dedicated to answering questions and promoting research. Please don’t hesitate to contact them with any questions: http://measurementlab.net/contact

Best,

Ory