What is Packet Loss?

Packet loss happens when data packets traveling across a network fail to reach their destination. Common causes include network congestion, faulty hardware, wireless interference, and ISP routing issues. This impacts video calls (freezing), VoIP (audio dropouts), and gaming (rubber-banding). Rating scale: less than 0.1% is excellent, 0.1-1% is acceptable, 1-2.5% is noticeable, and greater than 2.5% is problematic.

What is Latency?

Latency is the time for a packet to travel to a destination and return, measured in milliseconds. It is affected by physical distance, hop count, network congestion, and processing time. We report both average latency and p95 (95th percentile) to show tail latency that affects user experience. Rating: less than 20ms is excellent, 20-50ms is good, 50-100ms is fair, 100-200ms is poor, and greater than 200ms is bad.

What is Jitter?

Jitter is the variation in latency over time. It is critical for real-time applications like video calls and gaming that need consistent packet delivery timing. Rating: less than 2ms is excellent, less than 5ms is good, 5-15ms is fair, 15-30ms is poor, and greater than 30ms is bad.

What is a Network Path?

A network path is the route that data takes as it travels from your device to a destination server across the internet. Instead of moving directly, data passes through multiple intermediate routers and networks, called hops, before reaching its destination. Each hop can introduce latency or packet loss, which affects overall connection performance.

What is a MAC Address?

A MAC address (Media Access Control address) is a unique hardware identifier assigned to a device's network interface card (NIC). It is used to identify devices within a local network (LAN) and operates at Layer 2 (Data Link Layer) of the OSI model.

A MAC address is 48 bits long, represented as 12 hexadecimal characters in the format 00:1A:2B:3C:4D:5E. The first half (OUI) identifies the manufacturer, and the second half uniquely identifies the device.

What is an IP Address?

An IP address (Internet Protocol address) is a unique numerical identifier assigned to every device on a network. It allows devices to communicate across local networks and the internet. There are two versions: IPv4 (e.g. 192.168.1.1) which is 32-bit, and IPv6 (e.g. 2001:db8::1) which is 128-bit. IP addresses are used for routing data between networks, while MAC addresses handle delivery within a local network.

What is DNS?

DNS — the Domain Name System — is the internet's address book. It translates human-readable domain names like example.com into the IP addresses that computers use to route network traffic. Without DNS, every website would need to be reached by a raw IP address. DNS is a globally distributed, hierarchical database: when you type a domain into your browser, your device queries a recursive resolver, which follows the hierarchy through root nameservers and TLD nameservers until it reaches the authoritative nameserver that holds the actual records for the domain. Each record has a TTL (Time to Live) that controls how long resolvers cache the answer before fetching a fresh copy.

What is an Autonomous System (AS)?

An Autonomous System (AS) is a collection of IP address ranges and routers under the control of a single organisation — such as an ISP, cloud provider, university, or large enterprise — that presents a unified routing policy to the rest of the internet. Every AS is assigned a globally unique Autonomous System Number (ASN), written as a plain number (15169) or with an AS prefix (AS15169). Autonomous systems exchange routing information with each other using BGP (Border Gateway Protocol), the protocol that determines how traffic flows across the public internet. When you look up an IP address, the AS lookup reveals which organisation owns that address block and where it is registered.

What is a VPN?

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a technology that creates a secure, encrypted tunnel between your device and a remote server located somewhere on the Internet. Instead of sending your traffic directly to websites or online services, all of your network activity first travels through this encrypted tunnel to the VPN server.

Because the data inside the tunnel is encrypted, your Internet Service Provider (ISP), network administrators, or anyone monitoring the network cannot see the actual contents of your traffic. They can only observe encrypted data being transmitted to a single destination — the VPN server.

From the perspective of the websites and services you access, your traffic appears to originate from the VPN server rather than your own device. This effectively hides your real IP address and replaces it with the IP address of the VPN server.

When you connect to a VPN, three key things happen:

• Traffic Encryption – Your data is encrypted, protecting it from interception while traveling across the Internet.

• IP Address Masking – Your real IP address is hidden and replaced with the VPN server's IP address.

• Location Masking – Websites see the geographic location of the VPN server instead of your actual location.

Together, these capabilities help enhance privacy, improve security on untrusted networks, and enable access to resources as if you were connecting from the VPN server's location.

What is an SSL Proxy?

An SSL proxy (also called a TLS intercepting proxy) is a network device or software that sits between your device and the internet and intercepts encrypted HTTPS connections. Rather than your device connecting directly to a website, the proxy establishes two separate TLS connections — one with your device and one with the destination server — allowing it to decrypt, inspect, and re-encrypt your traffic in the middle. This means the TLS certificate your browser receives comes from the proxy, not the actual website. SSL proxies are commonly deployed in corporate and school networks for security monitoring, content filtering, and data loss prevention. From a privacy perspective, an SSL proxy can observe everything you send and receive over HTTPS, including login credentials and personal data, even though the connection appears encrypted to the user.

What is a DNS Leak?

A DNS leak occurs when your device is connected to a VPN but DNS queries — the lookups that translate domain names like example.com into IP addresses — are still being sent to your Internet Service Provider's resolver instead of through the encrypted VPN tunnel. Every domain you visit generates a DNS query before any data is transferred, so a leaking configuration allows your ISP to observe your full browsing history even though your traffic appears encrypted. DNS leaks are one of the most common and least visible privacy failures in VPN setups, because the VPN connection itself may appear healthy while DNS continues to bypass it entirely.