Know your network is call-ready,
at a glance.
Network Quality Monitor lives in your Chrome toolbar and quietly checks latency, jitter and packet loss every 30 seconds — the three things that actually make or break a VoIP call. The icon tells you everything before you hit "Join", and opening it streams a live, once-a-second view of your connection.
Try it right here
This is the real popup running on simulated data — click the face to cycle good → wobbly → rough → offline, or click the chart to open the longer trend.
In the real extension the live view updates every second from your actual connection.
Traffic-light toolbar icon
Green, amber, red or grey — redrawn live, with signal bars so the state reads even without colour, plus an optional latency badge in ms.
The metrics that matter
Latency, jitter and packet loss from 16-probe HTTPS micro-bursts to Google & Cloudflare edges — including Google DNS at literally 8.8.8.8.
Real call-quality score
A MOS estimate (ITU-T G.107 E-model) turns the raw numbers into a single 1–4.5★ "can I call?" verdict.
Smart alerts
Notifies when quality drops and when it recovers — with hysteresis and cooldowns so a single blip never spams you.
Realtime view + trends
Open it and the sparkline streams once a second; click the chart for the longer trend over 30 min to 24 hours, with median, jitter and worst-loss stats.
Zero site access
No accounts, no analytics, no servers of ours — and no host permissions. Probes are timing-only; the only thing it asks to do is show notifications.
How it works
Browsers can't send raw ICMP pings, so NQM times tiny HTTPS round-trips instead — which is closer
to how your real call traffic behaves anyway. Every 30 s (configurable) it fires a micro-burst of
16 probes, 160 ms apart, at an anycast connectivity endpoint
(gstatic.com/generate_204 by default — the same endpoint Android uses — with Cloudflare and
Google DNS at 8.8.8.8 as alternatives). A warm-up request absorbs the TLS handshake, then:
latency is the burst's median round trip, jitter is the mean swing between consecutive
round trips, loss counts probes that error or stall, smoothed over three bursts, and MOS
converts all three into a call-quality score. Your status is the worst of the four:
| good | fair | bad | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Latency (round trip) | ≤ 200 ms | ≤ 450 ms | more |
| Jitter | ≤ 30 ms | ≤ 60 ms | more |
| Packet loss | ≤ 2.2% | ≤ 6% | more |
| MOS call score | ≥ 4.0 | ≥ 3.6 | less |
Why no bandwidth test? A voice call needs ~100 kbps — any line that passes the latency check has the throughput. Constant speed-testing would saturate your connection and corrupt the very numbers that matter.
Get NQM
Two ways today, one more coming.
Chrome Web Store
The one-click way, with automatic updates. The listing is being prepared — coming soon. This page will link to it the moment it's live.
Manual install
Download nqm.zip and unzip it. Open chrome://extensions, switch on
Developer mode (top right), click Load unpacked and pick the unzipped folder. Pin NQM to the toolbar.
Just looking?
The live demo above is the actual popup UI on simulated data — poke around, open the settings gear, click the face.