When you want to check your home internet quality, Speedtest.net is usually the most convenient option. But it’s a surface-level tool—it doesn’t offer any deep insight. That’s why Doug Suttles, founder and former CEO of Ookla, is launching “Orb,” a free, always-on internet quality dashboard.
Orb runs on all of your devices to collect minute-by-minute data on internet speed, responsiveness, and reliability. It presents this information in detailed charts that provide deep insight into your long-term home internet performance, though it also gives you a handy “Orb score,” which is just a glanceable figure that rates your internet performance on a scale from 0 to 100. If your score falls below 80, Orb will tap into an LLM and make suggestions for how to improve your connection.
The Orb dashboard is, on its own, quite useful. It kind of reminds me of the Fitbit app—you can see short-term and long-term deficiencies in your home network that could inspire you to upgrade your router, move your devices to areas with better Wi-Fi reception, and so on. But the coolest part of this app, in my opinion, is multi-device metrics. All of your Orb-enabled devices appear in the Orb dashboard, meaning that you can compare the internet performance of all the devices on your network, or even compare performance across several different networks.
I assumed that Orb would only support a handful of devices at launch, but it already works on an impressive variety of products—Windows and Linux PCs, Macs, phones and tablets, routers, and smart home devices (the Orb team specifically mentions smart doorbells). The installation process is easy on some devices—just download an app—but it can be slightly more complicated on niche platforms like Steam Deck.
“At its core, Orb is a sensor that runs without disrupting your connection or device. It measures Responsiveness, Reliability, and Speed using lightweight, continuous tests, and provides easy-to-understand scores for networking novices as well as the technical details for us nerds. Using the Orb apps, you can view all the connections you care about over time, making it easy to see what happened just a moment ago or overnight last night. You can also set up alerts to promptly get push notifications when problems occur.” – Orb
The Orb app is free and doesn’t require an account. That said, if you don’t set up an account, the Orb dashboard will only show devices on your local network. A login is required for remote multi-device tracking.
Interestingly, Doug Suttles says that he’s committed to keeping Orb free for personal use. The company behind this app, Orb Forge Incorporated, will make money by selling subscriptions to enterprise and business customers who require large-scale deployments.
As a quick aside, this app does raise some security concerns—it collects a lot of data, it’s designed to be always on, etc. I’d like to see Orb Forge Incorporated come out and discuss security at some point, but in the meantime, those who are worried can simply wait to install Orb or close the app when it isn’t needed.
You can install Orb on all of your devices by visiting the Orb.net website. Note that this app is technically still in beta and contains some bugs. Several new features will be added to the app in the coming weeks, including the ability to share Orb data via a temporary URL in order to show off or troubleshoot your internet connection.
Source: Orb via TechCrunch
