Home - 14/03/2012

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How does our Broadband Quality Monitoring work?

We have partnered with Firebrick who manufacture the FB6000 device, which produces a device which is designed for high scale testing of latency and packet loss, which is connected to the same high speed uncongested network as our speed test.

The Firebrick device sends out an ICMP echo request (a 'ping') packet and measures how long it takes for your router (or computer if you have a DSL modem) to respond. We then plot the graph based on 100 seconds' worth of pings for each point to show the minimum, maximum and the average (mean) latency. If any packets are dropped (i.e. we don't receive a response), this will be drawn in red from the top of the graph down.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does my graph show 100% packet loss?

This may be due to firewall settings or because your IP address has changed. If you have a firewall, ensure that it allows ICMP ping. You will also see 100% packet loss if the address we are monitoring is disconnected from the Internet. You can find out how to configure your router or firewall using our router setup guides.

Can you monitor my connection if I have a dynamic IP?

We can only monitor your line if you have a static IP address as we are not able to track changes to your IP address at the moment. We will look at adding this functionality in a future version.

My IP address starts 10.x.x.x, 192.168.x.x can I monitor it?

These are local IP addresses that are used locally on your network. We would only be able to monitor as far as your broadband router. To find out what the IP address of this is, please use our What is my IP page.

Will you still monitor if I turn my computer off?

We can only monitor devices that are connected to the Internet and powered on. If you use a broadband router which is separate from your computer, and remains turned on when you turn your computer off, we should be able to monitor this. However if you turn off your router, or you turn off your computer which uses a broadband modem rather than router, we would not be able to monitor it, and it should show up as 100% packet loss.

Will this use up my usage allowance?

We only send very small ping packets every second. These are 28 bytes in size, so the total usage from our system would be 2.42MB (megabytes) per day, or on average around 73.63MB (megabytes) per month. Most broadband packages with usage allowances would measure them in Gigabytes (1000MB), so this would represent an insignificant amount in your usage allowance. If in doubt, please contact your service provider.