How to check Internet Speed via Terminal?

Question

Instead of going to sites like Netspeed etc i want to check my current internet speed in terminal in 11.10, how can i do it?

Answer 1

Well I use wget for it. That little tool tells me nicely what speed I have.

To use it just point to a file in internet that is relatively bigger so that you can get a better estimate of it.

For example

typing: wget http://hostve.com/neobuntu/pics/Ubu1.avi would start to download the Ubu1.avi file and show at what speed it is downloading.

Of course there are several recommendations:

1. Speed test yourself with good servers. In the case of my link the speed is less than 200KB so if you have a higher speed, the server will be the bottleneck for you, not your actual speed.

2. The highest speed you will see is the maximum speed that your connection and the server's connection can offer. If your connection is 512KB and the place where you are downloading is 400KB, your max connection will be 400KB because it is the max for the server you are downloading from.

3. You need to do the test at least 5 times to have a reliable speed check or at least do it for a minute or two. This will help you have a more accurate check.

4. You need to have at least 4 or 5 different testing sources to have a more accurate speed. Never test only from the same site as this can be affected by your distance to it, any problem in the server and the connections to it, etc. Always test from different servers.

Answer 2

try this on command line

wget --output-document=/dev/null http://speedtest.wdc01.softlayer.com/downloads/test500.zip

try this too

sourceforge.net/projects/tespeed/

got it from above link

Answer 3

If you can't be bothered to install iperf , you could precede any command that shifts a known amount of data with the time command and do a sum.

iperf is simple and easy to use.

It requires a client and server.

(on the server)

 user@server$ iperf -s

(on the client)

 user@client$ iperf -c server.domain
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 Client connecting to 192.168.1.1, TCP port 5001
 TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
 ------------------------------------------------------------
 [  3] local 192.168.1.3 port 52143 connected with 192.168.1.1 port 5001
 [ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
 [  3]  0.0-10.0 sec    113 MBytes  94.7 Mbits/sec

More Details

Answer 4

I recommend the speedtest-cli tool for this. I created a blog post (Measure Internet Connection Speed from the Linux Command Line) that goes into detail of downloading, installing and usage of it.

Install Git

$ sudo apt-get install git-core

Clone the Repository from GitHub

$ git clone https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli.git

Sample Usage and Output

$ ./speedtest-cli
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration...
Retrieving speedtest.net server list...
Testing from Comcast Cable (x.x.x.x)...
Selecting best server based on ping...
Hosted by FiberCloud, Inc (Seattle, WA) [12.03 km]: 44.028 ms
Testing download speed........................................
Download: 32.29 Mbit/s
Testing upload speed..................................................
Upload: 5.18 Mbit/s