Connected Devices Tests
Below is an overview of all the available Connected Devices tests.
Network Layer Tests
These tests measure the performance of the internet service provided to users. They make up all the tests that are free to use on an on-net network when you purchase a Connected Devices license.
Speed is the primary measure by which broadband connections are sold, so it's important to measure it. We offer a variety of different mechanisms to measure speed.
TCP Speed Tests
Our standard speed test, used on routers and mobile apps.
Hardware-Accelerated UDP Speed Tests
This speed test can take advantage of specific Broadcom and Qualcomm hardware to measure extremely high speeds.
Lightweight Capacity Tests (UDP)
An alternative speed test that is ultra lightweight in terms of bandwidth usage and time.
WebSockets Speed Tests
A WebSockets and XHR-based speed test for use in web browsers.
Latency, packet loss, and jitter affect everything you do on the internet. If these fare badly, then every other test will fare badly. So they are critical to measure.
UDP Latency and Loss Tests
Our standard, continuous latency and loss measures.
ICMP Ping Tests
Similar to the UDP latency test, but using a different protocol.
Contiguous Latency and Loss (Disconnections) Tests
An enhancement to our standard latency tests that track outages/disconnections.
UDP Jitter Tests
Commonly used to simulate a synthetic VoIP (voice over IP) call where a real SIP server is unavailable.
Latency and Loss Tests Under Load
Measures round-trip working latency which is more representative of actual internet experience, and often much higher than idle latency measurements.
Routing Layer Tests
Traceroute is used to determine the path that traffic takes between a source and a destination. It works by sending packets (typically UDP) with increasing TTLs (time to live) towards the destination, and capturing the IP that responds with the ICMP TTL exceeded error.
DNS Layer Tests
The Domain Name System (DNS) converts a hostname (such as www.example.com) into a computer-friendly IP address (such as 192.168.1.1). Every time you want to load a webpage, this translation must occur. This test measures how long it takes. It’s configurable and can test against a target DNS server over UDP, DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TLS.
Web Layer Tests
Measures the time taken to fetch the HTML and referenced resources from a page of a popular website.
Like their video streaming cousins listed below, the generic streaming test allows you to specify a video manifest file and hosting provider of your choosing.
Voice Layer Tests
Voice over IP Tests: See UDP Jitter Tests
The Voice over IP (VoIP)/UDP Jitter tests measure the quality of a simulated voice call between the agent and a nearby test server. It is intended to characterize how suitable your broadband connection is for placing and receiving VoIP calls.
Dynamic Application Test Suites
Our gameplay tests measure latency, packet loss, and jitter to a wide array of popular online games. The approach varies slightly depending on the game in question, but they all share common characteristics. Crucially, our tests take measurements on the real gaming infrastructure of the game in question. This is sometimes determined in partnership with the game publisher, sometimes it is determined from publicly available information, and sometimes it is determined by studying the game’s traffic. Some of the games we currently support are:
Among Us
Apex Legends
Battlefield V
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III
Counter-Strike 2
Diablo III & Diablo IV
DOTA2
EA Sports FC
Fortnite
Gears of War 5
Halo Infinite
Hearthstone
Heroes of the Storm
League of Legends
Overwatch 2
PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (desktop and mobile)
Roblox
Rocket League
StarCraft 2
Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six Siege
Valorant
World of Warcraft
Our video conferencing tests measure round-trip latency and packet loss to the most popular online video conferencing services. Many different protocols and communications are used during video conferencing. Our measurements focus on traffic to the video and audio relay servers, as problems on this link will manifest differently as connectivity and quality issues to end users. We support:
Google Meet
GoTo Meeting
Microsoft Teams
Skype
Cisco Webex
Zoom
Social media tests measure the round-trip latency and reachability of a selection of major social media services, taking into account different endpoints that the social media services may use for different content types. We support:
Facebook
Facebook Messenger
Instagram
Instagram Messenger
WhatsApp
Snapchat
Twitter
Modern console games are delivered from online stores such as Steam, Xbox Live and Playstation Network. The games can be tens or even hundreds of gigabytes, so achieving high throughput from these stores is important to gamers. The throughput will depend on the CDNs (content delivery networks) that host the games. ISPs, for example, will have varying connection agreements with CDNs, which means that users’ performance could vary significantly depending on the ISP they use and where the CDNs are located. We support:
PlayStation Network
Xbox Live
Steam
We have developed a variety of video streaming measurements that stream real content from major video streaming providers. This allows you to gain an accurate view of how video is delivered to users. We support:
Netflix
YouTube
BBC iPlayer (UK only)
CDNs are widely used by large websites to distribute static content near to end users. This reduces the burden on the content providers' servers and improves web page load times. The largest CDN operators will place caches inside networks such as an ISPs so that traffic does not even need to leave their network. We support:
Microsoft Azure
Cloudflare
Apple
Amazon AWS
Akamai
Google
Alibaba
Tencent
Fastly
Limelight
Local Network Information
Internet traffic crosses many interconnected networks, but performance is only as good as the weakest link in the chain. Degradation inside the home or office is commonly the weakest link, but there is very little understanding and published data about how much performance is actually lost inside the home/office.
Passively measures the amount of data consumed on the user's broadband connection.
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