Netfox 0.18.0 — is it my connection, or is it the internet? 🔌

Hey everyone 👋

New module shipped, and it answers one question without a terminal, a router admin page or a speed test: is my connection the problem, or is it something past my door?

The Link panel on the Netfox Overview — the wired half, the radio with its headroom and its rate, the error counters, and the first-hop split

🔌 What the cable negotiated, against what it could have. A 10-gigabit port that settled for 1 Gb/s is not broken and nothing in macOS tells you it happened. Netfox names it, and names the two usual reasons — the cable, or the switch at the other end.

📡 What the radio is really doing. Not just "Wi-Fi 7 at 720 Mb/s", but how much room you have: 39 dB of headroom, signal against noise. And whether that rate is holding — the panel takes two samples and says steady, up or down. During development the radio moved half a gigabit in two seconds, same network, same room. One reading would have called that a property of the link 🤷

✅ Whether anything is being dropped — right now, and since boot. Two separate claims, because a link that has been clean for weeks can start dropping frames this second.

📍 And how far away the delay starts. "First hop 3.6 ms, then 11 ms more past the router." That split is the whole point: it is the difference between a problem you can fix and one you can only wait out.

My favourite part is what it refuses to say 🤐 A radio that is off has no band, so those pills are left out rather than filled with "Unknown". A link nothing crossed gets no clean bill of health — it has not been shown to be fine, it has not been shown anything. And a router that ignores pings is reported as untimeable, not as a fault, because plenty of them drop pings by policy.

No new permissions, no helper, no extra traffic except the latency check — which rides the switch you already have. Six languages. Free 🦊

👉 Try it, or see what's new: https://netfox.app

Would love to hear what you want to see next.