The founders of Speedtest.net and Downdetector are launching Orb, a new app to measure the overall quality of your internet connection – beyond simple bandwidth figures.
Testing the speed of your internet connection is an operation that internet users are familiar with. It allows you to quickly get an overall idea of the quality of the connection. But ultimately, it's quite limited, since these tests essentially measure bandwidth and latency. At first glance, you might think that's enough.
And yet, even access with high throughput and low latency can be marred by disconnection issues. While Wi-Fi connectivity can also impact the experience you get from your PC or smartphone. These tests are still useful, particularly to check what your ISP is managing to deliver to your router during measurement.
Why measure the quality of of your connection is better than just relying on speed
That's why the Orb.net app tries to deliver something different – ultimately allowing you to get a more solid opinion on your internet access. All by compiling a score on a scale of 100 which aggregates, in addition to speed, other key aspects of the services observed on your side of the fiber. All this finally allows you to get, in an instant, a reliable idea of the quality of your connection.
Created by the founders of Speedtest.net and DownDetector, the app changes the paradigm compared to other speed tests. First, you can (recommended) add multiple devices from which measurements will be taken. The application then periodically measures (every minute, every 5 minutes, every hour, or every 24 hours, depending on your settings) the important indicators of your access.
Among these, we find, of course, a throughput test. But this adds a bit of nuance – by aggregating the average throughput and the peak throughput. Then there is the reliability of the connection, which aggregates the uptime (and therefore takes into account outages and other incidents), and packet loss, which is independent of throughput and latency. Finally, Orb.net also measures latency, distinguishing between the latency of the Wi-Fi connection and that observed between your router and your ISP's infrastructure.
All this in a very granular way, with the best latency time compared to the worst measurement and an average in milliseconds. As well as Jitter, and the average web page loading time. Speed, reliability, response time... the measurements in each section each result in a score out of 100. The overall quality score of your access is thus an average of these three scores, also on a scale of 100.
Orb.net is a free application available on a multitude of devices. This includes Android smartphones, iPhones, Windows 11 and Linux PCs, Macs, but also many routers (OpenWRT, WLAN Pi), IoT (Raspberry Pi), Steam Decks, the Docker containerized application framework, and much more.
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