The FCC launches a "beta" consumer broadband test on broadband.gov on March 11th. The site uses Measurement Lab (M-Lab) as its back-end platform. M-Lab is a private deployment of PlanetLab spanning 15 sites across the US and Europe.

PlanetLab is a global research network that supports the development of new network services. Since the beginning of 2003, more than 1,000 researchers at top academic institutions and industrial research labs have used PlanetLab to develop new technologies for distributed storage, network mapping, peer-to-peer systems, distributed hash tables, and query processing.

PlanetLab currently consists of 1085 nodes at 498 sites.