Quick SupportWi-Fi & Network Stability Test
A speed test tells you how fast your connection is on a good day. It won't tell you why your video calls break up, why the game rubber-bands, or why the back bedroom is hopeless — because those aren't speed problems. They're jitter and dropouts, and this measures both.
Run the test
About twenty seconds. Leave this tab in front while it runs — a browser slows down a page you've switched away from, and the numbers come out meaningless. Give the run a name if you're going to compare a few.
- Latency
- — ms
- Jitter
- — ms
- Worst spike
- — ms
- Dropped
- —
Press start and leave the tab alone for twenty seconds.
Your runs
Kept in this browser only — never sent anywhere. Compare a wired run against a wireless one, or walk the house with your phone and run it in each room.
| Run | Latency | Jitter | Worst | Dropped | Remove |
|---|
How to prove it's the Wi-Fi
Every request this test makes goes out through your Wi-Fi first, then your modem, then the internet. So one run on its own can't tell you which of those three is the problem. Two runs can.
- 1. Run it on a network cable. Plug a laptop straight into the modem or router and run the test. That's your baseline — everything from the modem outwards.
- 2. Run it again on Wi-Fi, in the same spot. Same machine, same minute, cable unplugged.
- 3. The difference is the Wi-Fi. If the wired run is clean and the wireless one is spiky, the problem is between you and the router — not your internet plan, and not your provider.
- 4. Then walk. Run it next to the router, in the middle of the house, and in the worst room. Name each one. That's a coverage survey, and it's what decides whether you need a mesh node, an access point or a cable run.
If the wired run is already bad, stop — it isn't your Wi-Fi at all, and that's a modem, line or provider problem worth bringing to us.
What the numbers mean
- Latency — how long a round trip takes
- Under 30 ms is good, 30–60 is fine for anything, 60–120 starts to be felt in games and calls, and over 120 something is wrong. ⚠️ These are browser round-trips, which read a little higher than a command-line ping — compare them against each other, not against a number someone quoted you from a different tool.
- Jitter — how much that time wobbles
- This is the one that matters for calls and games, and the one a speed test never shows you. Under 5 ms is excellent, up to 15 ms is fine, 15–30 ms is where voices start to chop, and over 30 ms a video call will break up no matter how fast the connection is.
- Worst spike — the single longest wait
- One 800 ms spike in twenty seconds is the freeze you notice mid-sentence. A steady connection with an occasional huge spike is the classic signature of Wi-Fi interference or a device fighting for airtime.
- Dropped — requests that never came back
- Any drop at all in twenty seconds is worth noticing. Several is a real fault. On Wi-Fi this usually means you're too far from the router, or on a crowded channel.
What a web page can't do — and why
Worth saying plainly, because it's the obvious next question and the answer isn't "we couldn't be bothered":
- It can't ping your router, or any device in your house. Browsers have no ping at all, and a secure website is deliberately blocked from talking to equipment on your private network. That's a security rule that exists so a dodgy website can't go poking around your home network — which is worth having, even though it costs us this.
- It can't measure the speed between two of your own devices. Same reason. Copying a file between two computers never touches a web page.
- It can't see your signal strength, channel or band. Whether you're on 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz, how strong the signal is, and which access point you're joined to are all invisible to every browser. On Android a Wi-Fi analyser app will show you all three; on an iPhone, Apple blocks those too.
- It can't tell Wi-Fi from a cable, reliably. Some browsers hint at it and most don't, which is why the test asks you to name the run instead of guessing.
The real versions of all of those live on a proper tool on the machine itself — which is what we run on a callout when a house or an office has a network that misbehaves.