Everyone knows their broadband’s headline speed. Almost nobody knows the numbers that actually decide whether Teams calls stutter, cloud apps feel slow, or the Friday backup finishes before Monday. Those numbers are latency and jitter, and your provider’s marketing doesn’t mention them.
So we built a tool that does.
What the test measures
Our free connectivity and speed test runs in your browser, with no sign-up and nothing installed, and gives you four things:
- Download and upload speed, the familiar bit.
- Latency: how long a round trip takes from your office to the services you actually use. We test against AWS, Azure, Microsoft 365 and Teams endpoints across the UK, Europe and the US, not a conveniently close test server.
- Jitter: how much that delay varies. Jitter is what makes voices robotic on calls. A line can be fast and still jittery.
- A Teams readiness rating, because “is it good enough for calls?” is the question behind most of the tests people run.
Why latency matters more than speed
Once a line is fast enough for its job, extra speed does very little. A 900 megabit line with high jitter will give you worse Teams calls than a 100 megabit line with a clean, stable path. Cloud applications are the same: every click is a round trip, so 30 milliseconds of latency feels snappy and 150 milliseconds feels like treacle, whatever the download figure says.
That’s why the test measures the path to the clouds you actually work in. If your Microsoft 365 latency is fine but AWS is poor, that tells you something useful about routing, and it’s fixable.
What to do with a bad result
A poor result isn’t a verdict, it’s a clue. Sometimes the fix is Wi-Fi or cabling inside the building. Sometimes it’s a congested consumer-grade circuit that needs replacing with a proper leased line. Sometimes the answer is smarter routing with SD-WAN, or a backup path via 4G/5G so a single circuit can’t take the whole office down.
Run the test at a quiet time and again at the busiest part of the day. If the two results look very different, congestion is your problem. Either way, if the numbers don’t look right, send them to us and we’ll tell you what they mean, no charge and no obligation.
