Glasnost: Test if your ISP is shaping your traffic

NEW!

10/12/10 New Glasnost test: We released a new Glasnost test that measures whether your ISP prevents you from using Usenet servers to download binary data. You can find and run it below.
05/31/10 Create your own test: You can now create your own traffic shaping test with Glasnost. Instructions can be found here.
04/08/10 New Glasnost tests: We released 7 new Glasnost tests that complement our BitTorrent test. You can find and run them below.
03/21/10 Our paper describing Glasnost's design was accepted for publication at NSDI 2010. Read the paper here.

The goal of the Glasnost project is to make ISPs' traffic shaping policies transparent to their customers. To this end, we designed Glasnost tests that enable you to check whether traffic from your applications is being rate-limited (i.e., throttled) or blocked.

Glasnost tests work by measuring and comparing the performance of different application flows between your host and our measurement servers. The tests can detect traffic shaping in both upstream and downstream directions separately. The tests can also detect whether application flows are shaped based on their port numbers or their packets' payload. For more details on how Glasnost tests work, please this link. --> read our NSDI 2010 paper.

We configured our tests to be conservative when declaring the presence of shaping, i.e., passing our tests does not necessarily mean that there is no throttling occurring on your link.

Select a Glasnost test to run

P2P apps		Standard apps		Video-on-Demand
BitTorrent eMule Gnutella		Email (POP) Email (IMAP4) HTTP transfer SSH transfer Usenet (NNTP)^NEW!		Flash video (e.g., YouTube)

Each Glasnost test takes approximately 8 minutes
Note to all users: To allow accurate measurements you should stop any large downloads that might run in the background.

Glasnost makes use of the Measurement Lab (M-Lab) research platform.
To learn what information our tool collects, please go here.

Who are we?

We are researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems. Our research focuses on characterizing residential broadband networks and understanding their implications for the designers of future protocols and applications. In case you have questions about this tool or our research, please visit our network transparency project webpage or contact us via e-mail:

Faculty		Students		Alumni
Krishna P. Gummadi Ratul Mahajan (Microsoft Research) Stefan Saroiu (Microsoft Research)		Marcel Dischinger Massimiliano Marcon		Saikat Guha (Microsoft Research) Andreas Haeberlen (University of Pennsylvania) Alan Mislove (North Eastern University)