The Weigher, which checks you get the internet you pay for

What the Weigher does#

The aletaster tested the manor's ale and bread for fair measure. The Weigher checks your internet line gives the measure you pay for: its speed, and every time it drops.

It only reports. It never restarts your router, changes a setting, or tells your provider anything.

It holds the Aletaster's office on an everyday PC. On a gamer's PC, the Bridgeward holds it, and the Weigher works behind it.

The Weigher comes with the Household license. It uses no AI.

The line, every minute#

Every minute, the Weigher asks the address Windows itself uses to tell whether it's online, and expects its one line back within 5 seconds. A café's or hotel's sign-in page answers too, with its own page, so that counts as a failed check. A check is a few hundred bytes.

Two failed checks in a row are an outage, from the first failed check to the first that gets through again.

Whose side. On each failed check, the Weigher asks your router too:

• The router answers, but the internet doesn't: the provider's side.
• The router doesn't answer, or there's no connection at all (Wi-Fi off, cable out): this PC's or the router's side.

Asleep is not down. While the PC is asleep or off, or the Weigher is off duty, the time is "not watched": neither up nor down.

Speed, every 3 hours#

Every 3 hours, and when you press Sample now, the Weigher measures your connection through Cloudflare's speed test, with no sign-in:

• Latency: how long a request takes to come back, and jitter, how much that varies.
• Download: 10 MB, timed.
• Upload: 5 MB, timed.

Each sample also notes the connection: Wi-Fi with its network's name, signal and link speed, Ethernet, or mobile. A weak Wi-Fi signal isn't the provider's fault, and the page says so.

Never on a metered connection#

Before each sample, the Weigher asks Windows whether the connection is metered. If it is, or Windows can't say, the sample is skipped, sending nothing, and listed as skipped, with why. So is a sample while battery saver is on (a setting), or with no internet.

Fair measure#

Tell it your plan's speeds, and it says how much of them you get, by time of day, with a verdict in plain words, and exports it all for your provider. See Check your provider gives the speed you pay for.

Its page#

The Weigher's page is at http://weigher.localhost:20606/, and Open on its card in Castellan goes there. It shows the line now (up, or down since when and on whose side), the last 24 hours an hour at a time, the fair measure, the samples and outages, and Check now and Sample now.

Its settings#

What it can't do#

• A sample measures this PC's connection, not the line alone: Wi-Fi, and other traffic on the network at the time, slow it. A cable to the router is the fair test.
• A line much faster than 200 Mbps is under-measured at 10 MB: raise Download per sample.
• A router that doesn't answer pings looks down, and a modem behind the router isn't seen.