Measure the Health of the Internet, Help Collect Local Traffic Measurements

Do you live in one of the following countries?

• Bolivia
• Brazil
• Burkina Faso
• Democratic Republic of Congo
• Georgia
• Iraq
• Kazakhstan
• Madagascar
• Malawi
• Maldives
• Morocco
• Palestine
• Philippines
• Samoa
• Sudan

If so, the Internet measurement community needs your help and you don’t need any technical knowledge to contribute!

The Internet Society Pulse team is developing a methodology to quantify and map content service locations to understand where content—such as video streams and images—is served from. Whenever you watch a video on a streaming service, browse a website, or chat over social media, you access content on servers that could be in-country or out-of-country.

This information will help us understand how much Internet traffic is local, meaning it’s served from local or nearby servers rather than servers in a different country or continent. It is important for an efficient and functional Internet that traffic stays as local as possible and keeping traffic local helps keep Internet costs low.

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How You Can Help?

Our goal is to understand how ‘far’ your traffic needs to go or come from when you access these services. To map this, we need your help, and you don’t need any technical knowledge to contribute.

To map traffic flows, we’re using data from two open-source tools run by our colleagues over at the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI) and at the RIPE NCC (the Regional Internet Registry for Europe, the Middle East and parts of Central Asia). Because there are a low number of measurements coming from the countries listed above, we are asking residents of those countries to help increase the amount of data from those countries by running OONI Measurements and/or hosting a RIPE Atlas probe.

Run OONI Measurements

1. Install the OONI Probe on a mobile device. See instructions here.
2. Click on the link below that corresponds to your country and choose to open it with OONI Probe if prompted.
3. That’s it! The measurements will run and be uploaded automatically.

Bolivia	Iraq	Morocco
Brazil	Kazakhstan	Palestine
Burkina Faso	Madagascar	Philippines
Democratic Republic of Congo	Malawi	Samoa
Georgia	Maldives	Sudan

Run a RIPE Atlas Probe

RIPE Atlas probes run a series of in-built and user-defined measurements, namely ping, traceroute, DNS, SSL, and HTTP. By hosting a software or hardware probe, you will become part of a global measurement network where researchers and network operators can run measurements to understand the health of the Internet from your network’s perspective.

Note: If you need additional help with hosting or installing a probe we may be able to assist you, so do not hesitate to email us.

How This Will Help

The Pulse team will analyze the results from OONI repositories and run measurements using RIPE Atlas probes to determine where in your country content is being served from. We will publish these results and keep you informed of our findings on the Pulse blog.