Ping

This is the new partner for speedtest.net, which measures your broadband upload and download speeds. pingtest.net measures how successful your connection to a local server is in terms of packet loss, which unfortunately didn't work for me even though I disabled my firewall and tried a few times; jitter, which for me was 1ms and indicates the variance in ping times, and the ping time itself, which the site measured at 13ms. I repeated the test and got the same results each time. All the results were plausible and I have no reason to assume that they're anything less than accurate. The killer part is that having run a local test, which is what you'd generally do, you can go on to select a target anywhere in the world and ping that. This is going to be very useful for businesses which need to monitor the quality of a connection between two offices, for example. And you can play idly with it over coffee, though I suspect the novelty would wear off eventually. I was going to hold back a star because I thought the graphics were a major overkill until I realized I was supposed to play with them. That could be clearer indicated but otherwise this is very cool and a worthy partner to its sister site, speedtest.net. Also see http://www.sitejabber.com/reviews/www.speedtest.net