Internet speed tests aren’t just for people who obsess over their internet connection. When my friends or parents are experiencing an inevitable home internet slowdown, my first recommendation is always to start with a speed test. 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 simply 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.

Meet Orb

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 free, 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 without slowing down your Wi-Fi.

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.”

What does Orb track?

Responsiveness — which includes measurements like lag, latency, jitter and packet loss — is the main metric Orb uses to “grade” your internet connection out of 100. 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 — but speed, or throughput, alone is no longer the only factor in determining a good internet plan.

I see this often while reviewing home internet plans: While most internet shoppers mainly focus on speed and cost, plenty 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 say that standard internet speed tests are 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.”

How does Orb work?

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 strain your network’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, which uses a much heavier payload, 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 from whatever room in your house or apartment they’re in. 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.

Hands-on with Orb

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 grade 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 says.

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.”

Final thoughts

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.