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 read our NSDI 2010 paper.

As of Feburary 2017 Glasnost is no longer available. Glasnost is based on Java applet technology, which is no longer supported in modern browsers. Hence, after more than 8 years in operation we decided to shut down Glasnost.

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: