An anonymous reader writes: 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.