RTS Logo

RealTimeSpeed

Advanced Network Monitoring

Continuous Speed Test

Standard tests only give you a 15-second snapshot. Our continuous monitor runs indefinitely, painting a live graph of your connection's heartbeat to catch intermittent dropouts and throttling.

SYSTEM IDLE
CONNECTING...
DOWNLOAD RATE
164.1
Mbps
MB/s
RTS SCORE
--
Score
UPLOAD RATE
68.4Mbps
GLOBAL LATENCY
0.0MS
NETWORK STABILITY LOG

Why You Need a Continuous Monitor

We've all been there: your Zoom call freezes, or your game starts rubberbanding. You quickly open a new tab and run a speed test. By the time the test finishes, it proudly proclaims you have a perfect 500 Mbps connection. Why? Because you just fell victim to the "Snapshot Illusion."

Traditional speed tests are designed to measure your maximum capacity over a brief 15-second window. But network instability—like router micro-drops, ISP throttling, and Wi-Fi channel interference—often happens in bursts. A traditional test will almost always miss these events.

A continuous speed test works like an EKG monitor for your internet. It doesn't stop. It continuously sends lightweight telemetry data back and forth to our edge servers, plotting your latency, jitter, and bandwidth on a live graph. If your internet drops out for even 2 seconds, our continuous monitor will catch it.

How to Diagnose Your Network

01 // The Wi-Fi Interference Test

Start the continuous monitor on your laptop or phone. Slowly walk away from your router and into different rooms. Watch the graph. If you see massive spikes in ping or sudden drops in download speed in specific rooms, you have found Wi-Fi dead zones or physical interference.

02 // The ISP Throttling Test

Leave the monitor running in a background tab during "Peak Hours" (usually between 7 PM and 11 PM). Cable ISPs share neighborhood bandwidth. If your graph is stable at 2 PM but becomes highly erratic and slow at 8 PM, your ISP's local node is congested.

03 // The Bufferbloat Test

Start the continuous test. Then, on another device in your home, start downloading a massive file or streaming a 4K video. If the graph on your test device suddenly spikes into the red, your router suffers from Bufferbloat (poor traffic queuing).

04 // The Router Hardware Test

Run the continuous test while connected to Wi-Fi. If the graph is erratic, plug your laptop directly into the router using an Ethernet cable. If the graph immediately flattens out and becomes stable, your ISP is fine, but your Wi-Fi router hardware is likely failing.

Continuous Monitoring FAQ

Why do I need a continuous speed test?
A standard speed test like Ookla takes a 15-second snapshot of your connection. This is great for checking your maximum bandwidth, but terrible for diagnosing real-world issues. Drops in connection, ping spikes, and jitter often happen in micro-bursts over several minutes. A continuous test runs until you tell it to stop, allowing you to catch intermittent ISP throttling, Wi-Fi interference, and router drops that a 15-second test would miss entirely.
Does leaving the continuous test on use a lot of data?
Our continuous monitor is designed specifically to be lightweight. While traditional tests download gigabytes of dummy data to max out your connection, our continuous tool relies on a steady stream of very small telemetry packets via WebSockets. It uses very little bandwidth, meaning you can leave it running for hours without hitting your ISP data caps or slowing down your other devices.
How long should I run a continuous speed test?
For diagnosing a specific issue (like gaming lag or video call drops), let the test run for at least 5 to 10 minutes while you are experiencing the issue. If you are trying to prove to your ISP that your connection drops intermittently throughout the day, you can safely leave the monitor running in a background tab for several hours. The real-time graph will visually record any dropouts.
What is the difference between ping, jitter, and bandwidth?
Bandwidth (Download/Upload) is the total amount of data you can transfer at once. Ping (Latency) is the time it takes for a single piece of data to reach the server and come back. Jitter is the variance in your ping. A continuous speed test monitors all three, because while your bandwidth might be 1 Gbps, high jitter will still cause your Zoom calls to freeze and your games to lag.
How do I fix the spikes I see on the continuous graph?
If the graph shows sudden red spikes (high ping or jitter), try plugging your device directly into the router with an Ethernet cable. If the spikes disappear, your Wi-Fi router is the problem. If the spikes continue on a wired connection, the issue is likely Bufferbloat (network congestion from other devices in your home) or an external issue with your ISP's infrastructure.

Continue Reading

Is your connection unstable?

Don't just guess. Use our real-time monitor to see exactly what's happening with your download, upload, and ping variance right now.

START REAL-TIME TEST