I recommend internet speed tests to pretty much everyone I meet experiencing the inevitable home internet slowdown. In fact, I’ve tested and used dozens of internet speed tests -- the market is pretty saturated with them. Ideally, the best internet speed test is one that diagnoses your bandwidth blues as easily as possible -- no ads, no extra features you can’t make sense of and no slowing down your Wi-Fi.
Speed tests are nothing new in the home internet space, but then again, I’ve never used a speed test quite like Orb before.
The creators of the industry’s most popular speed test, Ookla, rolled out Orb at the end of April. (Disclaimer: Ookla is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.) While I was skeptical about what value Orb could bring to the internet speed testing market, I felt differently after I downloaded the app to my iPhone and personal computer a few weeks ago.
Orb is a sophisticated speed testing application. It doesn’t just test your download and upload speeds; it measures the overall health of your home network holistically, using multiple metrics and continuous speed tests.
Orb co-founder and CEO Doug Suttles says Orb isn’t really a speed test at all.
“We’re not a speed test, that’s the best way to put it,” Suttles tells me. “We have speed testing functionality, but we focus far more on what we call responsiveness.”
Responsiveness -- which includes measurements like lag, latency, jitter and packet loss -- is the main metric Orb uses to rate your internet connection. Reliability, or the network’s responsiveness over time, and speed are secondary measures that Orb takes into account.
“It’s a different side of broadband that we’re focusing on,” Suttles says. “The things that we built at our past company were perfect for the time when we built them, when broadband was in its infancy and you needed to measure throughput first and foremost.”
With data use surging and internet speeds soaring, our lives are more connected than ever -- and speed alone is no longer the only factor in judging a good internet plan.
I see this often while reviewing home internet plans: While most internet shoppers mainly focus on speed and cost, a host of other factors, beyond advertised max speeds, determine whether a connection is reliable or consistent.
Jamie Steven, president and co-founder of Orb, says a reliable internet connection, not just a fast one, is vital for his rurally located home.
“The connection would go down all the time,” Steven says, “Speed wasn’t always or very often was not the issue. The issue was reliability and responsiveness.”
Suttles and Steven compare typical internet speed tests as akin to measuring a car's top speed. Instead of focusing solely on speeds, Orb focuses on whether your internet stalls or how quickly it can accelerate.
Additionally, Steven notes that the top speed of most cars is impractical for everyday use.
“It’s not what you’re doing day-to-day,” Steven says, referring to max internet speeds. “For us, it was more about continuous measurement of your internet experience.”
Part of Orb’s ingenuity is its ability to run those continuous speed tests, instead of only running speed tests when you’re experiencing delays or interruptions. My first thought was that such an approach would put a hit on one’s bandwidth. But Suttles assured me that Orb uses a much smaller payload (around 10MB) compared to popular speed test alternatives. For rural internet users like Steven, that lighter payload makes all the difference in keeping his internet connection stable.
If you’d like to give your internet a stress test, Orb does come with a “peak speed” function to test your network's capacity, but that’s not a continuous test.
Every device you connect to your internet acts as an "orb" or "sensor" that tests your internet connection. You can also set up a dedicated device to continuously monitor your network, 24/7.
There is one downside to Orb as it compares to other speed tests: You can’t run the tests in a browser. You’ll have to download the application to a device (which could be anything from a spare smartphone to a Raspberry Pi). Once you create an account, you can basically download Orb to anything with a hard drive -- and easily diagnose your internet issues in different rooms, simultaneously.
Orb is completely free and easy to use. A few weeks ago, I installed it on my phone and personal computer and used it to test my fiber internet connection. Using a scale of 0 to 100, Orb gives your internet a rating that’s pretty easy to understand: Red (0 to 49) means poor performance and green (90 to 100) means your internet is performing excellently. My internet connection gets a solid 90 most of the time -- not bad for AT&T’s cheapest speed tier.
"We want consumers to use this because these are problems that all of us on the founding team have had at home,” Steven says. “We want this to be free forever."
“There’s more value in building a brand than in trying to monetize consumers for something that, quite frankly, we’re so passionate about, we just want to give it away anyway,” Suttles notes.
I used Orb to test the internet connection in my office and the speeds I was getting in the living room where my TV is. Both tests showed results typically consistent with what I’d see using Ookla.
Orb is still in its beginning stages -- while it’s an effective tool for understanding how your internet connection works, there are a few features coming to the app that will make it even more user-friendly, like the ability to access historical data (similar to Ookla).
“Orb does record all data locally first…,” Steven notes. “We just hadn’t presented it in the UI, but that was something we were very passionate about. We didn’t want to require cloud connectivity to be able to see the past.”
Perhaps most importantly, Orb will eventually start releasing recipes for measuring the connectivity of specific applications or services, like Microsoft Teams or Slack and, eventually, even specific internet services.
“Different web services use different sorts of protocols,” Steven says. “So Zoom might use this special RTSP protocol -- can my connection open that port to that service? Is it accessible? What’s its responsiveness?”
Down the road, Suttles and Steven would like to see Orb used by the community to create different “recipes” and ways of measuring reachability.
“At its core, Orb is really a recipe engine,” Suttles says. “Our vision is to release and share new recipes, then have the community start creating them.”
The internet isn’t getting any cheaper, and while it might be tempting to just buy more speed, there are simpler ways of diagnosing and boosting your connection first. While Orb (and the internet) continue to evolve, it’s a good idea to have a holistic sense of your network’s connectivity, beyond speed.
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