Ookla, which defines itself as a provider of connectivity intelligence, has introduced Speedtest Pulse. The tool, the company says, provides smartphone-based validation and troubleshooting. It is aimed at broadband service providers (BSPs) and enterprises.
Speedtest Pulse is designed to help keep user experience high as Wi-Fi moves from being what the Ookla press release calls a commodity status to a key element of increasingly complex networks supporting a growing number of connected devices.
“While service providers are delivering impressive speeds to the home, the quality of the customer’s experience is limited by the performance of the in-home Wi-Fi,” Ookla CEO Stephen Bye said in the Speedtest Pulse announcement.
“Technicians have been forced to choose between overly simple apps and cost-prohibitive expert systems. Speedtest Pulse is the solution the industry has been waiting for. We’re putting the same advanced expertise trusted by 90% of the Fortune 500 directly into the hands of every technician, giving them a powerful tool to validate in-home Wi-Fi quality, solve problems on the spot, and improve customer experience.”
The Ookla Speedtest Pulse platform currently offers one mode, Active Pulse. A second — Continual Pulse — will be released next year.
Active Pulse provides instant validation of new installations or pinpoints the source of a network issue with a single, guided test. It can find problems in the inbound internet into real-world visibility and improvement recommendations.
Continuous Pulse is a leave-behind testing tool that will collect performance data to establish baselines, identify intermittent problems, and detect performance degradation, the press release says. The goal is to “break the cycle of hard-to-reproduce issues and repeat technician visits.”
The Speedtest Pulse product comes on the heels of Ookla’s mid-September introduction of Speedtest Certified, a program that offers the company’s endorsement to properties with “superior connectivity,” according to the official announcement.
The certification program goes down the same road as Ookla’s Speedtest Pulse. At the time of the introduction, Ookla Lead Industry Analyst Mark Giles hinted at the new product in comments to Telecompetitor: “Assessing and providing some validation for properties is something that’s been on our radar for quite some time,” he said. “The challenge has always been: You can’t do it very well with crowdsourced data, because it’s variable. You need a controlled test.”
