Ways to use the Broadband
Monitor
Broadband Monitor can monitor your broadband connection to insure that the
connection is active and that you have currently have access to the Internet.
Use this quickly to tell if you’re up and running. Broadband Monitor is great
for checking wireless connectivity.
Instead of checking Internet access you can check to see that your wired or
wireless LAN is working. Just specify one or two computers on the network to
monitor. As long as the indicator is green, the connection is OK.
Broadband Monitor can be used to check if a specific web site or computer is up
and responding to pinging.
Options
This form is the main screen for setting or
watching the connection tests.
Main Indicator
Shows the results of the last test (green=pass, yellow=failed last test,
red=failed repeatedly), the number of times each test result has happened and
the time of the last test result.
Sites Section
Web sites or computers used to verify connectivity.
-
Main/Alt -
Primary and secondary sites used fro testing. This can be web sites,
computers on a LAN or an IP address.
-
Name -
Name of the web site or computer. This is the name that will be resolved to
an IP address and used for testing
-
IP Address -
This is the IP address resolved from the name.
-
Test -
Press test button to check connectivity.
Loop Section
Tells how often to check the connection. The test uses Ping to test the
connection and measure the connection speed. More about testing…
-
Start/Stop -
Starts/Stops the test sequence.
-
Loop Counter -
Counts how many times the test loop has been completed.
-
Loop time -
Time, in minutes each loop will take.
-
Time to Live -
Time-to-live (TTL) is a value in an Internet Protocol (IP) packet that tells
a network router whether or not the packet has been in the network too long
and should be discarded. For a number of reasons, packets may not get
delivered to their destination in a reasonable length of time. For example,
a combination of incorrect routing tables could cause a packet to loop
endlessly. A solution is to discard the packet after a certain time and send
a message to the originator, who can decide whether to resend the packet.
The original idea of TTL was that it would specify a certain time span in
seconds that, when exhausted, would cause the packet to be discarded. Since
each router is required to subtract at least one count from the TTL field,
the count is usually used to mean the number of router hops the packet is
allowed before it must be discarded. Each router that receives a packet
subtracts one from the count in the TTL field. When the count reaches zero,
the router detecting it discards the packet and sends an Internet Control
Message Protocol (ICMP) message back to the originating host.
The default TTL value is 64 hops. We recommend changing this to 128 if you
have difficulty reaching certain sites.
- Time
Out -
Time to wait for a reply from the site, in milliseconds.
Test Results
Section
Shows the results of the communications tests.
-
Status at … -
Shows OK if passes test, otherwise shows error.
-
Trip Time -
Shows the round trip time (in milliseconds) of a successful ping.
Grade Section
The grade section allows you to color code the results of the successful test.
The speed of the response can be compared against 4 different levels, each
identified with a shade of green. Remember that lower numbers indicate a faster
connection.
Control Section
-
Startup Automatically -
Check this if you want Broadband monitor to start up every time you log in
to Windows. The monitor will be added to the system tray and will start
automatically.
- Alarm when down(v1.2) - plays a short audible alarm when
connection is down.
- Log Results to file(v1.2) - logs test results to file for
monitoring and record keeping.
- Log Details to file(v2.0) - logs the results from each
test including response time, date, IP address
- Speed test (v2.0) - sets a threshold for responsive time;
alarms when too slow
