After nearly two years since Jamie kicked things off, we are finally out of stealth and unveiling Orb. The company is officially named Orb Forge, but we go by Orb - just like the platform we have created. Orb measures and continuously monitors Internet Experience, while maintaining user privacy. It’s available for personal use free of charge, without compromise.

The Orb team includes founders of Ookla and creators of both Speedtest and Downdetector. We are passionate about connectivity and are redefining how to interpret Internet Experience. A good experience is about much more than just bandwidth, and the popular consumer tools fail to convey the full story. What’s more, that full story can be complex and technical - so we have distilled the information into easily digestible scores that everyone can understand.

Orb can be easily installed almost anywhere: PCs, Macs, smartphones, tablets, routers, IoT devices, and even doorbells. It can discern if issues are present on your home network versus your internet connection. It can also monitor the availability and performance of networks remotely. Want to be alerted of home internet issues when you’re away? What about the connectivity at your mom’s house? Have a vacation rental and want to promote your internet quality to guests? How about remotely troubleshooting connectivity for a friend? Orb can do all of these things.

So how does Orb work?

At its core, Orb is a sensor that runs without disrupting your connection or device. It measures Responsiveness, Reliability, and Speed using lightweight, continuous tests, and provides easy-to-understand scores for networking novices as well as the technical details for us nerds.

Using the Orb apps, you can view all the connections you care about over time, making it easy to see what happened just a moment ago or overnight last night. You can also set up alerts to promptly get push notifications when problems occur.

Orb provides separate scores (out of 100) for Responsiveness, Reliability, and Speed, which combine into your overall Orb Score.

Responsiveness: Lag is the Orb metric for responsiveness. Lag captures how latency, jitter, and packet loss affect your experience.

Reliability: The dependability of a network to perform without interruptions. Think of it as the consistency of Responsiveness over time.

Speed: Measures throughput under normal and peak usage. Orb periodically tests your typical content speed and allows for manual peak speed tests.

The scores intentionally align with a typical grade system:

If the overall score for an Orb drops below 80, we present a button that says Improve Connection. This triggers an AI prompt utilizing whatever Orb knows about your connection. The response can be quite impressive.

Beta or not?

We had planned to launch the Orb platform as a public beta, but certain app stores made that challenging so we decided to drop the beta tag. With that said we do expect there to be bugs, and we very much welcome help from the community! Either use the feedback link in the Orb app settings or join us on Discord to have a discussion. We also invite others to help us experiment and document running Orb on all sorts of devices.

How will we make money?

I hear this question often. Orb will absolutely remain free for personal use, but we are obviously a company that needs revenue to sustain. We will end up with subscription tiers for large scale Orb deployments, but I see the consumer apps as the ideal R&D and marketing platform for our enterprise efforts. We already have active engagements showcasing how businesses can greatly benefit from Orb technologies. Interested in deploying Orb across your customer routers or embedding it into your customer care app? Please reach out to us!

What’s next?

We have a huge backlog of features on the way, and we welcome new ideas to lengthen the list. Something coming soon that I am excited about is the ability to share any of your Orbs (read-only) via a link—allowing live remote viewing for troubleshooting. This link would expire after a set amount of time. Providing remote tech support gets much easier with Orb! With time we’ll be introducing Orb-to-Orb testing as well as recipes allowing you to create and share new measurement tests.

I hope to see all of you soon on our Discord!