More than two years after the launch of Measurement Lab, the internet connection speed and analysis project, Google and the National Science Foundation are taking things to the next step and providing testers with free Netgear routers pre-loaded with benchmark and diagnostic firmware.

Measurement Lab (aka M-Lab) is a collaborative project tasked with aggregating truly vast amounts of data about internet connections in the US. Until now M-Lab has only consisted of software tools that you can run on your PC — but now, thanks to the Broadband Internet Service Benchmark (BISMark) project being led by Georgia Tech and the University of Napoli, M-Lab participants can provide data straight from the horse’s mouth: their router. BISMark is a customized build of OpenWrt, an open source Linux distribution, and in theory BISMark could be installed on any OpenWrt-compatible router (which is most modern routers)– but for now M-Lab is targeting the Netgear WNDR3700.

With BISMark installed, every single detail about your internet connection can be divined — data that will then be aggregated and analyzed by M-Lab to see how good your connection is and whether traffic caps or shaping are employed by your ISP. There isn’t any obvious mention about whether the data is anonymized or pseudonymized before submission to M-Lab (and Google), but presumably it is. The data collected by BISMark can also be viewed by yourself, which might be useful for diagnosing any connection issues you might have. If you have any questions about what exactly Measurement Labs is doing with your connection data, watch the video embedded below.

If you’d like to help with Project BISMark, you can sign up for a free Netgear WNDR3700 router with BISMark installed. You need to be in the US, too.

Google has had a very deep and involved relationship with the internet backbone and home connections over the last few years. Google will live and die on the health of the internet — and famously, its search results are now even biased towards faster-loading websites. Google already owns substantial backbone infrastructure, is actively trialling a fiber-to-the-door network, and it’s safe to say that it will also use the results from BISMark and M-Lab to further tweak its network and its services. More importantly, though, the results from BISMark and M-Lab will beautifully highlight which ISPs operate the tardiest networks and also the extent of any encroachments of net neutrality.

Read more at Google Public Policy Blog and Project Bismark, and visit the Measurement Lab