Netlora | Internet Diagnostics

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What Netlora diagnoses

Netlora is a free, browser-based internet diagnostic that measures the connection quality metrics standard speed tests skip. When your internet feels slow despite a fast speed test result, the cause is almost always bufferbloat — excess queuing delay that only appears when the connection is under real load.

A standard speed test measures peak throughput and idle ping. Both numbers are accurate. Neither tells you what happens to your latency when someone in the house starts a download, a backup runs in the background, or you're on a call while streaming. That is when bufferbloat reveals itself — adding 200–400 ms of hidden delay to everything real-time: Zoom calls, gaming, VoIP. The phenomenon was characterised by Jim Gettys and Kathleen Nichols in a foundational paper published in ACM Queue (2012).

The metrics Netlora measures

Loaded latency is your ping while the connection is saturated. Netlora measures it by running download streams and latency probes simultaneously — the difference between your idle ping and this loaded ping is your bufferbloat reading. The fix for most cases is enabling Smart Queue Management (SQM) on your router, using the fq_codel or CAKE algorithm specified in RFC 8290.

Jitter is the variance in round-trip latency across consecutive probes. High jitter causes choppy audio and game stutters even when the average ping looks acceptable. Voice and video codecs compensate with jitter buffers, but above roughly 20–30 ms of variance those buffers overflow and quality degrades audibly.

Packet loss is estimated from the fraction of HTTP probes that time out or fail. Even 1–2% loss causes rubber-banding in games and robotic audio on calls, because real-time protocols using UDP cannot retransmit dropped packets.

The complete measurement methodology — including the health score formula and its exact component weights — is documented on the Netlora methodology page. If your idle ping is high but bufferbloat is low, the likely cause is geographic distance to the test server, explained in why is my ping so high. If your speed test looks fine but your connection still feels slow, see why fast internet still feels slow.

Netlora stores test results by 8-character random ID only. No account is required. No IP addresses are stored. See the privacy policy for full details.