Is ISP throttling your internet connection?

Now the internet surfers could discover whether ISPs are slowing down their net speed or inappropriately blocking their access to websites. These ISPs take various steps to manage ever-growing traffic on their networks for the benefits of all users, but Google has launched a scheme for users who fear that their ISP uses the power to discriminate, favoring some traffic over others.

Various researchers are already using tools to test connection speed and checking that whether an ISP is blocking or throttling particular applications. To measure the speed of your internet connection and figuring out, how your ISP handles certain types of traffic, a team of academic researchers with 36 servers in 12 locations across Europe and the US are arrange to analyze the data. This data could end up with a better understanding of how the Internet is actually working and that understanding could lead to large-scale improvements.

With the help of Google's new online tools that will diagnose your network connection. Google's broadband test tools are located at Measurementlab.net. The site called M-Lab hosts three cool test tools with two more coming. M-Lab is a place from where you can conveniently launch and operate the measurements.

The first tool is Network Diagnostic Tool which is supplied by Richard Carlson from Internet2. It provides a sophisticated speed and diagnostic test which reports more than just the upload and downloads speeds but also attempts to determine what, if any, problems limited these speeds, differentiating between computer configuration and network infrastructure problems. The second one is Glasnost which is supplied by Krishna Gummadi and Marcel Dischinger from the Max Planck Institute. It attempts to detect whether your Internet access provider is performing application-specific traffic shaping. At present you can test that your ISP is throttling or blocking BitTorrent. The Network Path and Application Diagnosis is third tool which is supplied by Matt Mathis at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. It diagnose some of the common problems affecting the last network mile and end-users' systems. These are the most common causes of all performance problems on wide area network paths.

The two tools which are yet to launch are DiffProbe and NANO. DiffProbe attempts to detect if an Internet access provider is classifying certain kinds of traffic as "low priority," providing it with an inferior level of service. DiffProbe actively and non-intrusively probes the network path and tries to diagnose the nature and extent of traffic discrimination. NANO attempts to detect whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations.

These tools all load some software on your machine either as an applet within the browser or as software that must be installed. Also, many of the tests force you to give the software a hole in your Windows firewall since they are attempting unusual connections into the Internet. We believe that you can trust these test agents since they have been checked out by Google. Also these tools, from the Google, warn all the Internet Service Provider to check their policy of throttling our internet connection.

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