Test your connection before you buy

What the test measures

Twice a second for thirty seconds, your browser asks NoSpike's server in Sweden for an empty answer and times the round trip. The middle one of those times is your ping to that server. Jitter is how much one answer's time differs from the next, on average. A spike is an answer that took at least 25 ms longer than your median, and an answer that hasn't come after two seconds is counted as missed.

Run it twice if you can: once as you normally play, and once with the household's downloads and streams paused, or on a cable instead of Wi-Fi. The difference between the two runs is the part of your lag that starts at home.

What it can't measure

• Your ping in a game. A game's server is somewhere else, and games send UDP. A browser can only speak HTTPS, which rides on TCP, and TCP sends again whatever gets lost: a lost packet shows here as a spike, never as loss.
• A route through NoSpike, or through any other route optimizer. Those routes exist only inside the apps that make them. A web page that shows you such figures from your browser is estimating them or making them up, so this page shows none, ours included.

Reading your result

These are rules of thumb for this test, not a verdict on your games.

• Steady: jitter of a few milliseconds and no spikes. Your PC, your home network and your line are doing their job. If a game still lags, look at the road to that game's servers: what causes ping spikes shows how to find where yours start.
• Uneven or spiky: something between this browser and the internet is making packets wait. Most often that's Wi-Fi or someone else's upload. Wi-Fi or Ethernet for gaming covers the usual causes, and no route optimizer fixes a problem inside your home.
• High but steady: mostly distance. A round trip costs about 1 ms for every 100 km, so a figure that fits your distance to Sweden says little about a game hosted in Frankfurt or Amsterdam. Ping, jitter and packet loss explains what each figure does to a game.

The figure that decides it

Whether a route optimizer is worth paying for comes down to one comparison: your game's ping on your own connection against its ping through the optimizer's relays, to the server your match is on. A browser can't make that comparison. The NoSpike app does: it measures both over the same seconds and shows them side by side, and when your own connection wins it says "Direct is fastest" and routes nothing. The start page shows that screen, and the plans can be cancelled any time.

Comparing route optimizers fairly

If you're choosing between tools, compare them on your own line, not on anybody's chart, ours included.

1. One game, one server, your usual hour. Routes change through the day, and the evening is when they differ most.
2. Read the ping where the game shows it. Every game has its own display; the game pages say where to find each one.
3. Ten minutes each: on your own connection, then with each tool. Note the usual ping and the worst spikes, not the best moment.
4. Change one thing at a time. A tool that helps on a friend's provider can do nothing on yours, because the road it replaces is a different one.