Currently, the conventional way to assess internet connection is to analyze several metrics such as speed, latency, packet loss, and jitter. To do so, one of many websites/tools, such as Speedtest by Ookla etc, is used. These tools would typically choose one of their servers that's the closest to the incoming connection and then measures internet quality metrics.
Now there are two main problems with this approach. First, by choosing a server that is the closest to the incoming connection, usually, the destination server is in the same country as the incoming connection, thus facing less censorship/manipulation by that country's government. Second, even if you manually choose servers located abroad, sometimes, these well-known internet speed tests are whitelisted by governments. (such as the Islamic Republic of Iran) resulting in falsely good results that are not reproducible elsewhere.
To expose and quantify such censorship measures, Netreach has been developed to measure how much of the "Internet" is available with one's Internet connection.
We use a list of 1000 websites with the most traffic on the internet and then try to connect to a sample of these websites with a headless browser to see if they are reachable in a reasonable time. (#timeout)
Then we take a linearly weighted average and report the percentage of accessible websites.
How to use
1- Install Node v16 or later
2- Install Puppeteer dependencies
For Debian (e.g., Ubuntu):
sudo apt-get install ca-certificates fonts-liberation libasound2 libatk-bridge2.0-0 libatk1.0-0 libc6 libcairo2 libcups2 libdbus-1-3 libexpat1 libfontconfig1 libgbm1 libgcc1 libglib2.0-0 libgtk-3-0 libnspr4 libnss3 libpango-1.0-0 libpangocairo-1.0-0 libstdc++6 libx11-6 libx11-xcb1 libxcb1 libxcomposite1 libxcursor1 libxdamage1 libxext6 libxfixes3 libxi6 libxrandr2 libxrender1 libxss1 libxtst6 lsb-release wget xdg-utils
For CentOS:
sudo apt-get install alsa-lib.x86_64 atk.x86_64 cups-libs.x86_64 gtk3.x86_64 ipa-gothic-fonts libXcomposite.x86_64 libXcursor.x86_64 libXdamage.x86_64 libXext.x86_64 libXi.x86_64 libXrandr.x86_64 libXScrnSaver.x86_64 libXtst.x86_64 pango.x86_64 xorg-x11-fonts-100dpi xorg-x11-fonts-75dpi xorg-x11-fonts-cyrillic xorg-x11-fonts-misc xorg-x11-fonts-Type1 xorg-x11-utils && yum update nss -y
3- Clone the project
git clone https://github.com/NikolajHansen23/netreach.git
4- Install dependencies
npm install
5- Run the test
npm run start
1- Install Node v16 or later
2- Clone the project
git clone https://github.com/NikolajHansen23/netreach.git
3- Install dependencies
npm install
4- Run the test
npm run start
Execute docker run:
docker run -it --rm <docker-image>
It'd be the most accurate if you have the full bandwidth of your internet connection, meaning other devices and applications do not use it.
Also, the higher your RandomCoeff parameter, the more accurate and reliable your results will be.
Although you might be using a VPN or an uncensored internet, you still might fail to achieve very high scores (e.g., > 95%). The reason for this is multiple:
1- Even though we don't aim to measure the speed of your internet connection, your connection speed does matter, especially if it's very low. (i.e., < 8Mb). Sometimes reaching websites requires downloading a relatively high amount of data which might take longer than the default timeout. If your connection speed is low, you can try out greater timeouts to compensate for the low speed.
2- Other applications are using your processing power (i.e., CPU). Reaching websites requires sending many requests; Doing this repeatedly, as Netreach does, needs a lot of processing power. If other applications are using your CPU while running the test, it might affect the score. Even so, a typical 1-core CPU is powerful enough for this test.
3- Regional websites: Some websites we try to reach sometimes operate with regional restrictions. This is especially true for some Chinese websites. We try to spot these websites and exclude them from our list, but they might still exist.
First, thank you for using this tool. The easiest and most effective way to help us is to spread the word and recommend Netreach to a friend.
Sharing your test results in the results thread is also a great way to help us better judge the state of censorship in different ISPs.
RandomCoeff: RandomCoeff controls how big our sample size can be. 1 means all websites are included, 0.5 means a random sample of 50% of websites chosen, and so on. You can control this parameter either in the .env file at the root of the project or as an argument:
npm run start -- --RandomCoeff=0.3
By default, RandomCoeff is 0.1.
Timeout: Timeout specifies how long you would wait at maximum to reach a website. By default, Timeout is 7.5s.
Error: Could not find Chromium...
You can install Chrome manually by running node node_modules/puppeteer/install.js
If you run into a 403 error, then make sure you're either using a VPN/Proxy.