PlanetLab was originally designed to be a realistic testbed for networking and distributed systems research. It has served that role quite well. More recently, however, it has also become a practical platform for rapidly deploying (and then effectively managing) network services that have value to a wide-range of user communities (and a diverse set of network environments).

This talk describes three such deployments: (1) providing web connectivity to remote villages and schools; (2) capturing gold-standard measurements of broadband connectivity in the US; and (3) supporting high-speed content distribution in a Telco access network.