Does the internet speed test leave my network?
Yes. It has to — measuring your internet connection means sending traffic over your internet connection. The internet speed test contacts Cloudflare’s public speed-test endpoints, so that traffic leaves your local network and Cloudflare sees it as it would any other visitor. PulseLAN asks for your consent the first time and won’t run the test until you agree.
That is the only feature that leaves your network. The LAN speed test, device discovery, and the ping monitor all stay on your local network, and scheduled monitoring stays local as long as the test it repeats is a local one. Latency under load is measured during the internet test itself, so it travels with it. Results are still stored only on your own device, and none of them reach us — we have no server that could receive them. The Tools page spells out the boundary tool by tool.
Why is my LAN speed different from my internet speed — and which one is the bottleneck?
They are two different links, so two different numbers is normal — see the first question above for why either can be the larger one. The useful question is which of the two is holding you back, and that needs both numbers at once.
PulseLAN’s internet test does that comparison for you. If your LAN throughput sits well below your internet throughput, the constraint is inside your house: access point placement, cabling, a device stuck on a slow band. If your LAN number is comfortably above, your internet plan sets the ceiling and rearranging your Wi-Fi won’t move it.
One caveat on the pairing: to decide that a stored LAN result belongs to the same network you’re on now, PulseLAN checks whether your local address falls in the same /24 range as the stored one. That’s a proxy for “still at home”, not recognition of your network — a different network reusing the same address range would look identical. With no recent LAN result to compare, you get the internet numbers and no verdict, rather than a guess.
What is bufferbloat?
Delay caused by oversized queues. When a link is saturated, a device along the path — a router, a modem, an access point — buffers the packets it can’t send yet. Big buffers avoid dropping packets, but they also mean your next packet waits behind everything already queued. Throughput looks fine; latency quietly climbs by hundreds of milliseconds.
That’s why a video call falls apart the moment someone starts a large upload, even on a fast connection. PulseLAN’s latency-under-load test measures ping while idle, then while a download saturates the link, then while an upload does, and reports how much delay each phase added along with an A–F grade. The grade is our own reading of those milliseconds, not an industry standard — the raw numbers shown beside it are the ones to trust.
Why is PulseLAN’s ping TCP-based instead of ICMP?
Because mobile platforms don’t give apps the raw sockets that an ICMP echo — what the terminal’s ping command sends — requires. So PulseLAN’s ping and packet-loss monitor uses a TCP-connect probe instead: it opens a TCP connection to a port on the target and times how long the handshake takes, and a probe that doesn’t complete in time counts toward the loss figure.
Expect it to read a little higher than ping on the same path — a handshake is more work than an echo reply, and some devices handle the two kinds of traffic differently. If you’re comparing against a terminal, compare the shape rather than the digits: the trend over time, the jitter, and the loss are what the tool is for.
Does monitoring run in the background?
Not as a background service — PulseLAN doesn’t install a daemon, and there is no 24/7 monitoring. What happens while you’re not looking at it depends on the platform:
Within those limits, monitoring does the useful part: it re-runs the test on your interval and keeps the results in history, which exports to CSV when you want a dated record. If you need a machine watching the link around the clock, that is a job for a device you leave awake and in the app on the monitoring screen — not something we will pretend a phone in your pocket is doing.
Does device discovery tell me who’s on my network?
It tells you what’s currently visible, with the best name available for each device — an mDNS name the device advertises, a reverse-DNS name your router returns, or the PulseLAN device name if PulseLAN is running there. Each entry is labelled with which of those it is. Anything offering none of them stays an IP address.
What it is not: PulseLAN doesn’t identify manufacturers or device types — no MAC-prefix lookups, no inference — so a brand name only appears if the device itself said it. And it is not a security scanner: it can’t tell you whether a device belongs on your network, it doesn’t detect intruders, and a device that stays quiet may not appear at all. It exists to help you find something to test against.