Asked if he personally had experienced much in the way of mysterious Internet slowdowns or blocked access, Feamster said yes, but that the problem always wound up being related to the choice of equipment he was using in his home, such as a DSL modem that had more buffering than it should have had.  And in fact, the Georgia Tech researchers are examining ways to drill down into information about how a user’s home network infrastructure or choice of ISP might affect the network performance they see.  The researchers have been deploying programmable home network gateway devices that replace the users’ existing gateways and taking a variety of active measurements of the users’ access links to better understand what causes performance degradation.

The $1 million Google grant is for 2 years, though another $500,000 could be awarded for a third year.

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in Network World's Wide Area Network section.