Wayne Priestley

Today I found a excellent site that helped me in a bit of trouble shooting on my network.

The problem was connection speed to the internet, lately it’s been rather slow and phoning my ISP ment I had to be connected via their supplied router in order to get tech support.

After sorting out the spaghetti that is the many many different cables and changing over routers I went to Speedtest.net to test out my line speed where I came across a link to PingTest.net. The side is still in beta at the minute but as you will see it helped me a while lot more than a simple speedtest did.

What is Pingtest.net?

Use Pingtest.net to determine the quality of your broadband Internet connection. Streaming media, voice, video communications, and online gaming require more than just raw speed. Test your connection now to get your Pingtest.net rating and share the result with others!

So what do they test?

Packet Loss

Much as it sounds, if you have anything less than complete success in transmitting and receiving “packets” of data then you are experiencing this problem with your Internet connection. It can mean much slower download and upload speeds, poor quality VoIP audio, pauses with streaming media and what seems like time warping in games — your connection may even come to a total standstill! Packet loss is a metric where anything greater than 0% should cause concern.

Ping

This measurement tells how long it takes a “packet” of data to travel from your computer to a server on the Internet and back. Whenever you experience delayed responses in Internet applications – this would be due to a higher than desired ping. Similar to packet loss, lower is better when it comes to ping. A result below 100 ms should be expected from any decent broadband connection.

Jitter

Once you understand ping, jitter should also make sense. Jitter is merely the variance in measuring successive ping tests. Zero jitter means the results were exactly the same every time, and anything above zero is the amount by which they varied. Like the other quality measurements, a lower jitter value is better. And while some jitter should be expected over the Internet, having it be a small fraction of the ping result is ideal.