NETWORK GUIDES
Testing your connection for gaming, streaming and video calls
Understand synthetic application workloads, competing traffic and why speed alone does not predict every gaming, streaming or meeting experience.
Different applications stress different parts of a connection
Gaming often depends on responsive control traffic. Streaming needs delivery that keeps up with playback. Video calls need traffic in both directions. Backups compete heavily for upload capacity. A useful test considers these differences and the effect of several activities happening together.
What the workload studio does
Select synthetic profiles and session counts, then choose the intensity, duration and data budget. The browser schedules application-like traffic against this site’s controlled endpoints. Results describe the traffic actually observed, including delivery, errors and inadequate coverage. They do not contact or benchmark your account with a third-party service.
Gaming and cloud gaming
The gaming control channel is a bounded WebSocket/TCP simulation with sequence and timing evidence; it is not UDP gameplay. Cloud-gaming profiles add frame-like download bursts and control traffic. These are delivery proxies rather than real rendered frames per second or a promise about a particular game server.
Streaming and meetings
The streaming profile uses HTTP segments and a synthetic buffering model. Conferencing includes synthetic media and browser WebRTC evidence. Both synthetic browser peers must select an external relay and deliver actual RTP packets and decoded frames. This verifies a network relay round trip, not an independent remote caller or a particular meeting service. Missing relay evidence remains inconclusive.
Test competing activities deliberately
Start with a repeatable quiet baseline. Add a known competing activity, such as a backup or stream, while keeping other conditions fixed. Observe loaded latency and profile-specific completion evidence. A single browser can create competing application flows but cannot reproduce contention among several physical Wi-Fi devices.
Use results as evidence for another check
If an application still performs poorly, compare its own diagnostics, destination and time of day with the test. Its server path, codec, rendering, account tier and software can matter. Do not infer that an ISP or router is at fault solely because one synthetic profile is inconclusive.