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Summary
- The new Orb app from the founders of Speedtest and Down Detector offers comprehensive analysis of internet connection health beyond just speed.
- The tool measures responsiveness, reliability, and overall rating to optimize user experience.
- The developers aim for enterprise-level adoption with planned features like real-time remote connection monitoring.
If you can’t log in to your favorite website, you might visit Down Detector to check if it’s still working. If you can barely browse the web at all, a quick trip to Speedtest can almost instantly track your connection speed. The creators of those tools are taking things a step further, giving users worldwide a straightforward, one-stop tool that analyzes far more about your connection than just how quickly it can move data.
Orb, a nifty application already available on most popular platforms, charts several data points over a specified amount of time. It then displays ratings from 1-100 in three critical connection health categories. And the enterprising developers have more plans in the works (via TechCrunch).
Related
Ensuring you get the most from your internet connection
And helping diagnose and treat problems
Screenshots of the Orb app in action on a Pixel 9 Pro.
Doug Suttles, former Ookla CEO, worked alongside longtime colleague Jamie Steven in creating and overseeing Speedtest and Down Detector. The internet has changed significantly in the two decades since Speedtest launched, and Suttles argues mere bandwidth numbers miss key performance figures that affect the internet experience.
Orb sets out to chart those less obvious metrics over extended timeframes from a minute to 24 hours. In addition to speed, it measures responsiveness by aggregating signal latency, jitter, and packet loss — the three major contributors to detectable lag. It charts reliability based on responsiveness over time. The app then combines all three to deliver an overall rating, and if yours is too low, offers more in-depth explanation with the help of an LLM interface.
The wide-ranging goals of a surprisingly ambitious project
Source: Orb Forge
Suttles, Steven, and company bypassed the beta phase entirely, and just unleashed the app on the world free of charge. According to its introductory blog entry, “Orb will absolutely remain free for personal use,” with the company aiming to court large-scale industry deployments for revenue.
Impressively, the just-launched Orb comes in a flavor for nearly any operating system you can think of. Its lightweight programming and flexibility mean you can install it on nearly any device with a microprocessor, including Android, Windows, Linux, IoT gadgets, and even smart doorbells. Dropping a functional program on the public without beta testing is bold, and as Suttles’ blog post points out, “We do expect there to be bugs, and we very much welcome help from the community!”
Suttles sees the “consumer apps as the ideal R&D and marketing platform” to help guide the new tools to industry-wide relevance. He shared the team has a “huge backlog of features on the way,” offering a teaser of one. Orb’s plan to implement time-limited links would let somebody else — a technician from your ISP, for example — view your connection health in real time, potentially saving time and effort on both ends when trying to optimize your connection. You can download Orb for most platforms right now, and join the Discord community if you’re especially interested.
