Consumer Tools for Auditing ISPs
Posted by cmdln on March 29th, 2008
While the discussion of network neutrality has definitely gotten murky, it is still important. Today players like Comcast and Verizon may be trying to find ways to play nicely with certain P2P applications and protocols, but since they are unhindered in competing in the application provider space, who knows whether this current and past wins will translate to future good faith on their parts.
It is one thing for researchers to be able to perform in depth analysis of ISP traffic handling. The opportunities so far for an active and interested consumer have been few and the bar to entry high, not for lack of technology but because few have undertaken the daunting task to make such technology simpler to use.
EFF just posted a decent round up of the current and near future offerings that may change this. I like especially that they give a little more explanation on different approaches in addition to a well considered laundry list of ongoing efforts. (Full disclosure, I am on the Net Neutrality Squad mailing list but have not contributed to the software development by Lauren Wienstein’s group of hacktivists mentioned in the article. I also interviewed Lauren when he first started discussing possible technologies to help assess ISP performance relative to a meaningful definition of neutrality.)