We are building measurement.network based on some reflections on challenges academic network measurements face.

In short, we think that doing measurements well requires researchers to be good programmers, good system operators, and well versed in decades of lore and history of the protocols they are working with. Together, in one person or team, this is a set of qualities hardly found in practice.

Furthermore, what one needs for measurements: Unfiltered network access, the ability to set whois entries and reverse DNS for netblocks etc., is often not easily available from local IT departments.

To get around these issues, we figured that it might be a good idea to setup an independent measurement platform, that can bring in industry expertise when needed (read: Before measurements are run and not after things went wrong).

So, let’s see if this gets off the ground.