The RIPE Atlas project

What’s like running water, only delivered directly to your hands? It’s the internet on your smartphone! This interconnection can seem magical, universal, global and instant. But it does so only until the moment something goes wrong. This free dingus can make the Internet faster, help you sort out your network and save remote communities article tells The RIPE Atlas project comes in to help figure out where the bottlenecks are – to the benefit of everyone! RIPE Atlas builds a network of small devices that measure the quality of interconnectivity between parts of the Internet. In addition to cool maps, the project lists several studies performed with the gathered data.

It’s free to participate. If you get accepted to the program you get a gadget that you connect to your Internet and commit keeping it connected. Project participants get information on the performance and reliability of their internet connections. To participate you need to be able to explain why you can add to the project, and data such as the Autonomous System Number (ASN) of your isp, which you can find out here. This looks like an interesting project.