Nov 04, 2022 19:00:00

'Blip', a free tool that allows you to quickly visualize the latency and packet loss of internet connections that should be emphasized in online games and web conferences

Not only network speed but also low latency and packet loss are important for comfortable online games and online meetings. The free web application ' Blip ' will visualize latency and packet loss just by accessing from a PC or smartphone. In addition to verifying the network environment, it seemed useful for searching areas with weak Wi-Fi strength, so I actually tried using it.

Blip

http://gfblip.appspot.com/

When you access Blip, green and blue dots are displayed one after another on the screen as shown below. The green point shows the response time of the CDN service (gstatic.com) provided by Google, and the blue point shows the response time of Blip developer apenwarr's website (apenwarr.ca). In the image below, we can see that gstatic.com responds in around 10ms.

When I walked around the GIGAZINE editorial department with a notebook PC, I was able to confirm that the connection with gstatic.com was lost at the timing when the connected router was switched.

Blip can also be used on smartphones. As a result of trying to access Blip on iPhone 8, access to gstatic.com was broken. Since the connected network is the same as the notebook PC above, it seems that the operation of iOS is affecting it.

As a result of switching to 4G communication and walking around outdoors, I found a point where the response speed dropped significantly in a densely built area. It seems safe to avoid games and web conferences over 4G communication at this point.

You can check the screen when you move to a point with poor communication environment in the following movie.

I tried to visualize network latency and packet loss with the free web application 'Blip' - YouTube



As mentioned above, if the response time fluctuates wildly in your network environment, or if the display of dots is frequently interrupted, it is recommended to review your network environment.

The source code of Blip is published on the following page.

GitHub - apenwarr/blip: A tool for seeing your Internet latency. Try it at http://gfblip.appspot.com/
https://github.com/apenwarr/blip