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Is it me, or is it my ISP?

One question, two very different afternoons. We measure your line and tell you which side the fault sits on.

Signalyzr mobile app launching soon — advanced diagnostics for radio signal and deeper cellular insight.

Outage boards tell you whether strangers are complaining, which is a different question from whether YOUR line is faulty — a dead access point and a regional failure look identical from your sofa. Signalyzr measures your own connection across six signals and reports which side of your front door the evidence points to, or says plainly when the evidence is inconclusive.

There are only three places this can go wrong, and they need three completely different responses. Inside your home — the access point, the band you latched onto, the distance and walls between you and it, or a device quietly saturating the line. At your provider — the link from your building to them, congestion at the exchange, or a fault upstream. Or beyond both of you — the route to one particular service, which is why a single app can misbehave while everything else is untroubled.

Guessing wrong is expensive in the most irritating way. Reboot the router when the exchange is congested and you achieve nothing but a two-minute outage you caused yourself. Ring your provider when the real culprit is a microwave oven sharing a channel with your 2.4 GHz band, and you will be walked through a script you have already tried, then told to wait.

What we do not do is count complaints. Crowd-sourced outage maps answer a genuinely different question — whether other people are unhappy — and their silence proves nothing about your line. A fault affecting one building generates no chatter at all.

What this measures

  • Which side of the router the loss appears on — we compare behaviour across your local hop and the path beyond it
  • Sustained download and upload, held long enough to expose congestion a two-second burst would sail straight past
  • Latency, jitter and packet loss to the nearest probe, measured while idle and again under deliberate load
  • Bufferbloat — whether your own line collapses the moment anything in the house starts uploading
  • DNS resolution time against a public baseline, because a slow resolver imitates a slow connection convincingly
  • Which carrier you are actually on, and whether you are on Wi-Fi or cellular right now

How it works

  1. Identify your connection and carrier, so the numbers are read against the right expectations
  2. Take an idle baseline first — latency, jitter and loss on a quiet line, which is the reference everything else is judged against
  3. Saturate the link deliberately and re-measure, because faults that only appear under load are the ones a speed test hides
  4. Compare the local hop against the wider path to see where the degradation actually begins
  5. Report the side the evidence points to — and say so directly when the signals disagree

Why this matters

Being able to say 'my line drops eleven percent of packets under load, here are the numbers' changes the conversation with a support desk entirely. It moves you past the restart-your-router script, because you have already done the triage their first tier exists to perform. It works in the other direction too: if the fault turns out to be a saturated 2.4 GHz band in your own kitchen, you have saved yourself forty minutes on hold to be told exactly that.

Top fixes

  • Before anything else, note whether the trouble is constant or arrives at a particular hour — evening-only trouble points at contention, not hardware
  • Test once on Wi-Fi and once on mobile data. If both are equally miserable, your Wi-Fi is exonerated and the fault lies further out
  • If you are on 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz is available, move and re-test — the single most common 'my ISP is terrible' cause that turns out not to be the ISP
  • Pause any large upload or cloud sync and re-test, since one greedy device can make an entire household's connection look broken
  • If the evidence points upstream, report it with the actual figures and the time of day, and ask for a line check rather than a reset

FAQs

Downdetector shows nothing. Does that mean my provider is fine?

No, and this is the most common misreading of those sites. They aggregate complaints, so they surface faults big enough for many people to notice and post about. A failure affecting one street, one building or one line produces no complaints and therefore no graph — while being completely real for you. A quiet outage board only tells you that a large regional failure is unlikely.

Can you prove my provider is throttling me?

Honestly, no — and be sceptical of any tool that claims otherwise from a single test. Deliberate throttling and ordinary congestion look nearly identical in a one-off measurement. What we can show is the shape of the degradation: when it appears, whether it survives a change of network, and whether it tracks the hours when everyone in your area is streaming. That pattern is evidence worth taking to a provider; a single number is not.

My connection is fine on my phone but awful on my laptop.

That points inside your home rather than at your provider, since both devices share the same line to the outside world. Usually it is the band, the distance, or the laptop's own adapter. Run the test on each device and compare the local-hop figures — if the phone's are clean and the laptop's are not, the line is not the problem.

How long should I test for before I ring my provider?

Take readings at two or three different times, ideally including a busy evening. Intermittent faults are the ones support desks are most sceptical about, and a single reading is easy to dismiss as a bad moment. Three readings at different hours showing the same pattern are considerably harder to wave away.

Do you need me to install anything, or log in?

Neither. It runs in the browser, there is no account, and we do not look at what you browse — we time our own probes and read the network's response to them.

Find out which side it is →

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Signalyzr is a free, privacy-first network diagnostic tool made in India. Loading the diagnostic app…