Live broadband quality monitor

Why watch your connection over time?

A speed test tells you how your line was doing for about thirty seconds. It cannot tell you what happens at seven in the evening, or during the call that keeps freezing. Most broadband complaints are about problems that come and go: a dropout that lasts a minute, congestion that only bites at peak time, or lag that appears whenever someone else in the house starts streaming. A single measurement will usually miss all of it.

Watching the connection continuously is what turns "it feels slow sometimes" into something you can actually show your provider. If a fault is real and repeated, that evidence matters, and it is exactly what our guide to compensation for service failure asks you to be able to describe.

What counts as good latency, jitter and packet loss?

As a rule of thumb, a round trip under 40 ms with jitter under 10 ms and almost no packet loss is a healthy connection for anything a UK household does. Latency is the delay on a round trip, jitter is how much that delay wobbles, and packet loss is the share of data that never arrives. The bands below are calibrated for a browser round trip, which runs a little higher than a raw ping. They follow the international guidance for interactive quality, which keeps one-way delay under 150 ms (ITU-T, 2003), and Ofcom's point that most online activities want a response time under 100 ms, with some gaming under 50 ms (Ofcom, 2023).

The call quality figure on the monitor is a Mean Opinion Score, estimated from your latency and loss using the ITU E-model, where about 4.3 and above is toll quality and below 3.6 means some callers would be dissatisfied (ITU-T, 2015). It is an estimate of how a voice call would sound on your line right now, not a measurement of a real call.

What do these numbers mean for what I actually do?

Different activities are limited by different things, so one number rarely tells the whole story. Gaming lives and dies on latency and packet loss. Video calls care most about jitter and loss: Microsoft's guidance for Teams targets a round trip under 100 ms, jitter under 15 ms and packet loss under 0.1% (Microsoft, 2025), while Zoom asks for latency under 150 ms, jitter under 30 ms and loss of 3% or less (Zoom, n.d.). Streaming, by contrast, barely notices latency at all: it is limited by sustained speed, which is why a 4K film needs bandwidth rather than a fast ping. If your speed is the problem rather than your latency, our broadband speed test and speed calculator are the better place to start.

What is bufferbloat, and why does it matter?

Bufferbloat is the lag that appears when your connection is busy, and it is the single most common reason a fast line still feels slow. Oversized buffers in routers and network equipment hoard data during a big download or upload, so your latency can jump from a healthy 15 ms to several hundred milliseconds. That is why a video call stutters the moment somebody else starts streaming, or a game lags while a console updates in the background.

An ordinary speed test hides this completely, because it measures speed, not delay while the line is working. Our test measures the rise in latency during a sustained download and grades it from A+ to F, the scale used by the established bufferbloat tools (Waveform, 2026). Under 5 ms of extra delay is an A+, up to about 30 ms is an A, and anything at C or worse is likely to be hurting your calls and games. The usual fixes are a better router, smart queue management if your router supports it, or moving to full fibre, which handles congestion far more gracefully.

How this monitor works, and where it is approximate

A web browser cannot send a true network ping, so this tool times a small HTTPS request to our nearest server instead. That round trip includes the network plus a little encryption and server handling, so it reads somewhat higher than the raw ping a hardware tool would report, and it reflects your Wi-Fi and home network, not only your broadband line. Packet loss is estimated by counting requests that fail or time out, which is a rough proxy: the underlying protocol quietly re-sends lost data, so real loss can hide as extra delay instead.

The monitor pauses itself when you switch tabs, because browsers slow down background timers and that would create false spikes and phantom packet loss. Everything is measured in your browser, nothing about your connection is sent to us or stored, and closing the tab discards it all. For a continuous 24 hour record you would want a dedicated monitoring service, and if your line is genuinely failing rather than just slow, our guides on fixing broadband that is not working and compensation for service failure set out what to do and what you are owed.