Ookla’s former CEO Orb is a new app that provides a broader understanding of your internet connection

Since its launch nearly 20 years ago, SpeedTest.net has been one of the most popular tools for measuring internet speed. But Doug Suttles, founder and former CEO of Ookla, the web testing company behind Speedtest, believes that measuring speed alone is not enough to tell people everything they want to know about their internet connection.

That's why Suttles launched a new tool called Orb, which measures latency, packet loss, jitter, and speed to allow you to measure the stability of your Internet connection.

Suttles started Orb in 2023 with Ookla director Jamie Steven, who said SpeedTest.net was the right tool at the time, but as internet speed became no longer a problem around the world, he felt people needed new, more holistic ways to evaluate their internet connections.

“The speed test is like a dipstick in a car, which will tell you that once the car crashes, you run out of oil. We want to build a dashboard that tells you that you have lower oil, so you can fix that,” Suttles told TechCrunch via call.

ORB examines three key variables for network connections: responsiveness, measured by a combination of lag, jitter, latency, and packet loss; reliability, which can measure responsiveness over time and packet loss; and speed, which are your usual download and upload speeds. All of these variables can be measured at different time intervals – one minute, five minutes, one hour and 24 hours.

The tool combines all three variables to give you a score to indicate the stability of your network connection. An ORB score above 80 means a good connection; 70-80 means your connection is OK, and if anything you get below this, there may be obvious problems.

If your score is below 80, the app recommends that you take steps to improve the performance of your network. The startup said it uses LLM to display descriptions of key issues and suggestions related to solving them.

ORB has applications for a variety of platforms including iOS, Android, MacOS, Windows and Linux. The company also offers a guide to installing tools on the Raspberry Pi, Onewrt, Docker, Steam Deck, Prox Max, Wlan Pi, old smartphones and other platforms for those who want to monitor their connections more frequently.

The startup is also working on a feature that allows users to set up an Orb and share it with others to let them monitor your connection. If the connection quality shakes, both users will be notified.

ORB is currently available for free and the company wants to keep it this way. Suttles said he hopes to license the technology to enterprises and ISPs so they can monitor and identify network problems with advanced alerts and analytics.

So far, the startup has raised $3.8 million from Sidekick Ventures and individual investors including Quick Senior Director Edward Bender; Netflix engineer Jana Iyengar; Big Network CEO Tom Daly; Rapid former Watershed Li Chen; Oculus Studios Jason Kay’s head of strategy and operations; THQ’s former president and founder of Naughty Dog Jason Rubin; Vetro’s director of strategy initiatives will Cooper.

Steven, who is also working on creating a lowering detector, said ORB also aims to create recipes for different services to help you detect whether a specific website can be accessed, such as Zoom, Netflix, X or Google Drive, to check if the service is working properly.