This page explains what each part of the dashboard shows and what the terms mean, in plain language. You shouldn't need to look anything up elsewhere — if something here isn't clear, that's a bug in this page, not in you.
What am I looking at?
Overview
Your headline picture: how fast your connection actually is, over time, split into small/medium/large test downloads and uploads. Use this to answer "what am I really getting from my internet?" at a glance — it's also the best view to screenshot if you want to show someone what your connection typically looks like.
Trends
A closer look at one specific test at a time. Pick a test and a measurement (speed, latency, jitter) and watch it change over the days or weeks you've been testing. Good for spotting whether things are getting better, worse, or staying the same.
Compare
Puts different test sources side by side, so you can see whether one is consistently faster or slower than the others. If one line sits well below the rest, that specific route may be the weak link — not necessarily your whole connection.
Latency & Bufferbloat
Shows how quickly your connection responds when it's sitting idle, versus when it's busy downloading something. If the two lines stay close together, your connection handles multitasking well. If the "busy" line jumps up a lot, that's called bufferbloat — it's why a video call can start stuttering the moment someone else in the house starts a large download.
Jitter
Shows how steady your connection's responsiveness is from one moment to the next. A flat, low line means a stable connection. A spiky line means your connection is prone to little hiccups — the kind that make calls choppy or online games feel laggy, even if your overall speed looks fine.
Time of Day
Averages your results by hour, across all the days you've tested, to reveal whether your connection tends to slow down at certain times — for example, in the evening when everyone in the neighborhood is online at once.
Reliability
Shows what fraction of your tests failed outright, and when. Useful for spotting outages, dropouts, or patches of time when your connection wasn't working reliably at all.
ISP Evidence
Enter the speed your provider advertised, and this page builds a plain, factual summary comparing that promise to what you actually measured — including how often you fell meaningfully short of it. It's designed to be something you can screenshot and send straight to your provider, or use as supporting evidence in a complaint.
What do these words mean?
Speed (throughput)
How much data your connection can move in a second, usually measured in Mbps (megabits per second). This is what people usually mean when they say "my internet is fast" or "slow." Downloading is data coming to you; upload is data going out from you — most home connections are quite a bit faster at downloading than uploading.
Latency (ping)
How long it takes for a small signal to reach a server and come back — usually just a few thousandths of a second (milliseconds). Think of it as "reaction time" rather than speed: a connection can be fast (good download speeds) but still feel laggy (high latency), or vice versa. Low latency matters most for anything happening in real time — calls, video chats, online games.
Bufferbloat
What happens when your connection gets so busy that everything else sharing it starts lagging. It's why a call can suddenly stutter the moment a big download or backup kicks off in the background — the download fills up a queue inside your router or modem, and everything else has to wait in line behind it. We measure this by checking your latency once with the connection idle, and again while a download is actively running — a big jump between the two is bufferbloat.
Jitter
How much your latency wobbles from one moment to the next, rather than how high it is. Imagine two connections that both average the same "reaction time" — one stays steady every time, the other swings wildly high and low. The steady one will feel smooth on a call; the wobbly one will feel choppy, even though its average looks identical. Low, flat jitter is good; spiky jitter means an unstable connection.
Median
The "typical" value — if you lined up every test result from lowest to highest, the median is the one sitting right in the middle. We use the median instead of a plain average because a handful of unusually bad (or unusually good) results can drag an average in a misleading direction. The median tells you what a normal, ordinary test looked like.
p5 and p95 (percentiles)
A way of describing your worst and best typical results, without being thrown off by a one-off fluke. "p5" means 5% of your tests were slower than this — so it's roughly "even on a bad day, this is about what you got." "p95" is the mirror image — roughly your best typical result, not counting rare lucky bursts. These numbers are widely used by network engineers and regulators for exactly this reason: they're a fair, hard-to-argue-with way to describe "how bad does it usually get," rather than cherry-picking a single best or worst result.
Spread band (the shaded area on some charts)
On charts with more than one line (for example, small/medium/large file downloads), the shaded area shows the full range between your slowest and fastest result at each point in time. A wide band means the different sizes performed very differently; a narrow band means they were all roughly the same.
Error rate
The percentage of tests that failed to complete at all, rather than just running slow. A rising error rate, or a cluster of errors around a specific time, often points to an outage or a genuinely broken connection rather than ordinary slowness.
Test cycle
One full round of testing — typically your bot runs several tests back to back (for example, a small file, then a medium file, then a large file) and we group those together as a single cycle when building certain charts.
File size (small / medium / large)
Each test cycle downloads (and sometimes uploads) files of different sizes. Small files tend to measure slightly slower speeds, because a connection takes a moment to "get up to speed" before hitting its true capacity — a brief transfer often ends before that happens. Large files give the connection time to reach full speed, so they tend to show your true sustained performance. This is completely normal and not a sign anything is wrong.
Advertised speed / underperformance threshold
"Advertised speed" is what your provider promised you'd get. The "underperformance threshold" is a line you choose (for example, half of the advertised speed) — any test result below that line counts as "underperforming" in your summary. You can adjust this depending on how strict you want the comparison to be.