Speedchecker, a private company running large-scale software-based monitoring networks and DD-WRT, the most popular open-source router firmware, announce a partnership which will aim to build the world’s largest hardware probe monitoring network.
Under the terms of the partnership DD-WRT started including the Speedchecker Probe client within the DD-WRT firmware. DD-WRT users can opt-in to the Speedchecker network and get new features for their routers in exchange for providing bandwidth for Internet measurements.
As Christian Scheele from the DD-WRT development team said:
“We are pleased to be part of this partnership to not only help fund the DD-WRT development but also be part of the project which enables Internet research be conducted on a large scale across many countries that are currently not represented in existing measurement networks”.
Since the soft-launch earlier this year over 2000 users of DD-WRT have already opted-in to the network, enabling Speedchecker to cover over 80 countries for its Internet measurements. Speedchecker offers access to its network to clients such as Microsoft and Oracle, as well as researchers in organizations such as LACNIC which publish Internet topology research.
CEO of Speedchecker Ltd, Janusz Jezowicz noted:
Historically, companies always had to make a choice of either running measurements from software probes with its wider coverage but lower accuracy, or rely on hardware probes which had limited coverage. With this partnership we are able to provide global coverage for hardware probes with low costs due to end-users running the tests on their own routers and not expensive custom hardware.