Is it my Wi-Fi or the internet?

Ping your router first. If that is slow or drops packets, the fault is your Wi-Fi. If the router answers cleanly, ping a numeric address such as 1.1.1.1; a failure there points at your internet connection rather than your network. If both answer and websites still will not load, the problem is name lookup rather than connectivity. Each check rules out one hop, which is what turns “the internet is broken” into something you can act on.

Four hops, four different problems

Between your phone and a web page there are four places to fail, and they need four different responses:

1. Phone to router — the Wi-Fi itself. Distance, interference, a bad band.
2. Router — the box. Overloaded, confused, out of addresses.
3. Router to the internet — the line and your provider. Nothing you can fix from inside.
4. Name lookup (DNS) — the service that turns example.com into a number. Everything is reachable and nothing is findable.

The connected icon on your phone reports only the first hop. That is why “connected, but nothing works” is the most common version of this problem and the least informative: the phone is telling you the truth about the only thing it was asked.

The four checks, in order

Do them in this order. Each one only makes sense if the previous one passed.

Reading what comes back

The number a ping reports is the round trip: out and back, in milliseconds. On a home network you are looking at three things.

Does it answer at all. A reply is a reply. A timeout is a timeout. Any timeouts in a run to your own router is a Wi-Fi problem, full stop.

How steady the numbers are. Twenty replies at 4, 5, 4, 6, 5 ms is a healthy link. Twenty replies at 4, 90, 6, 250, 5 ms is a link that is technically up and will make a video call unwatchable. That variation is jitter, and it matters more than the average for anything live.

How many came back. Nineteen replies out of twenty is 5% packet loss. On a local hop that is a fault, not a fluctuation.

What each of those means for whatever you were actually doing, whether a call, a game or a download, is in what ping, jitter and packet loss mean.

Two things worth knowing before you trust a ping

A ping that fails does not always mean a host is down. Ping uses ICMP, and plenty of servers and firewalls simply drop ICMP on purpose. Ignoring a ping is a perfectly normal configuration, so a timeout against a remote host is ambiguous: it could be down, or it could be declining to answer. This is why the order above starts with your own router — a hop where nothing has any reason to drop the packet, and uses 1.1.1.1 for the internet check — a resolver that answers ICMP by design.

Ping tests reachability, not speed. It measures how long a very small packet takes to make a round trip. That is the right measurement for a call, a game or a video conference, all of which care about delay and consistency. It tells you close to nothing about how fast a large file will download, which is throughput and a completely different test — what ping, jitter and packet loss mean takes that apart properly. A connection can have an excellent ping and poor bandwidth, or the reverse, and confusing the two is the most common way these results get misread.

Common results, and what they point at

What you see	Where it is
Router ping times out	Wi-Fi. Distance, interference, or the band.
Router fine, 1.1.1.1 times out	The line or the provider. Check for an outage; then call.
Both fine, names do not resolve	DNS. Change the phone’s DNS, or the router’s.
Everything fine, one site down	That site. Nothing to fix here.
Fine on mobile data, broken on Wi-Fi	Inside your home. Start at the router.
Broken on both	The provider, or a wider outage.

Doing this without a terminal

The ranking advice for this problem tells you to open a command prompt, which is fine on a laptop and unavailable on the device most people are holding when they ask.

Ping Network Tool is what we built for the phone version, and it has two modes because the two audiences for this question want opposite things.

Simple mode answers the whole question with one tap, in words: internet is available, host is not reachable, or DNS is not resolving. That is exactly the three-way split above, and it is the default on first launch — the History and Network tabs are not even shown until you ask for them.

Advanced mode runs a Linux-faithful ping: sequence number, TTL and round-trip time for each packet, line by line, with a live graph and the same min / avg / max / loss summary a terminal prints. Traceroute is one button away, hop by hop with the round-trip time for each, which is how you find out which hop is adding the delay rather than that something is. Every session is kept in a local history, so “was it this bad last Tuesday” is answerable.

One platform difference worth naming, because it is not a bug: the Network tab showing your gateway, DNS server and external IP is Android-only. iOS has no public API for the configured DNS resolver or gateway, so rather than ship a tab with one field in it we hide it there entirely.

It has no ads at all — a deliberate exclusion, not an oversight — and the diagnostic work is free. A single one-time purchase adds TCP ping and lifts the cap on background monitoring. There is no subscription — the reasoning is in what a puzzle game subscription costs.

The rest of the small utilities we make are on the Tools page, and why a services company builds them at all is on the About page.