The Open Society Institute is supporting Packet Clearing House in the development of open-source software tools which assist Internet Service Providers in optimizing the routing of their traffic, reducing the cost and increasing the performance of Internet service as delivered to the public.

The "PeerMaster" toolset functions as a kind of "matchmaking service" for Internet Service Providers, allowing the individuals within each ISP who are responsible for negotiating network interconnections to find each other quickly and easily, and facilitating the interconnection transaction. The NetFlow analysis portion of the toolset goes one step further, analyzing ISPs' traffic flow and prioritizing the other ISPs, other countries, and other regions with which the ISP has the greatest degree of mutual traffic, allowing them to make better-informed network interconnection choices. Lack of an open-source toolset has previously made these functions unavailable to all but the four or five largest international carriers, and it is our hope that this toolset will begin to extend the same operational efficiencies and economies to the parts of the Internet which can most benefit from them.

In addition to software development, OSI's grant will allow PCH to do outreach and training, to ensure that these open-source tools reach the engineers and analysts who will best be able to employ them in reducing the cost of Internet service in developing regions.

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