One more check mark in the column of why I decided to leave my last school before getting a PhD. There is an article posted currently on slashdot about a program called NETI at Georgia Tech (direct link to wired article).
These sort of tests are not new, the godfather of network testing Vin Cerf for example wrote papers on similar experiments years ago - the exciting idea is to get a large population of users to contribute to the testing.
What angers me is that I had this idea (I'm sure others also have) and the protoype back in 2001. In fact, it's tangentially what I went to graduate school to study. However, my department was horribly unenthused with the idea, even though they are considered a top networking group. Oh well, a lesson for the future.