A while back, I saw a project called zoomready that I thought might be a useful tool for watching a network connection (even though it was Win-only, and I'm a Mac fan), but I now see it's deprecated.

I'm not disappointed – I have found a web-based tool that seems to do a similar thing: the VSee Network Stability Test. It was developed by VSee, a telehealth company. I am guessing they created it as a tech support tool so that they can request troubleshooting information when customers call in and say, "Everything stinks!"

To use it, go to the page and start it prior to your video call. Leave it running in a separate web page for the duration. VSee displays three continually updating graphs: "MOS" (Mean Operating Score, a 1..5 measure of voice quality), packet loss, latency and jitter. These indicate the quality of the network connection, while only consuming 4-5kbps while it's running.

I peeked at the Javascript, it's pretty clever. It starts an RTC client in the browser, talking to an RTC server on the VSee side. Since an RTC session continually chit-chats with the other end (normally sending audio or video) there's a continuing (many per second) stream of requests/responses. I haven't verified, but I bet they instead time stamps in the stream to gather statistics.

I asked the VSee tech support folks if they minded if we publicized the test page to a wide audience – they said OK.

This post created with wordland.social, a slick “writer’s interface” to WordPress