Beagle Software’s free Broadband Monitor lets you quickly tell if your broadband connection is working. By running regular checks you can tell if your connection is up and if your connection speed is normal. It can run in the background (in the system tray) to monitor your connection.  

Features

Ways to use the Broadband Monitor 

• Monitor Broadband Connection

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.

• Monitor LAN/WAN Connection

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.

• Monitor Specific Website or Computer

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.

• Test - Runs a test with the current settings.
• Options - Exposes the test options
• Help - For on-line help.
• Exit - Exit program (or returns to system tray).

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.
   

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