What’s your upload and download speed at home (or in your office) ?
Are you really sure that you get what do you pay for to your ISP ?
To test the speed of our internet connection There are several internet services such as SpeedTest a web service that is available both from Web browsers and mobile application.
Now you can easily check it also with speedtest_cli a command line interface for testing internet bandwidth using speedtest.net. In this way you can do the test also on servers that don’t have a Browser or a graphical interface.
Installation
speedtest_cli it’s just a python script, so it’s really easy to install and use it, and you have different ways to do it:
1) pip / easy_install
Open a terminal and give the command:
pip install speedtest-cli |
or
easy_install speedtest-cli |
2) Github
To install directly from github you can use these commands:
pip install git+https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli.git |
or
git clone https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli.git python speedtest-cli/setup.py install |
3) As Ubuntu/Debian or Mint package
The package is available on the getdeb repository, you can easily add it with these steps:
– Install the getdeb package.
Or
– Configure the repository manually:
Go to System-Administration-Software Sources, Third-Party Software tab, Add:
deb http://archive.getdeb.net/ubuntu trusty-getdeb apps |
Add the repository GPG key, open a terminal window and type:
wget -q -O- http://archive.getdeb.net/getdeb-archive.key | sudo apt-key add - |
And now you can install the speedtest-cli package with the commands:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install python-speedtest-cli |
4) Just download (Like the way it used to be)
As last option, just download the python script where you prefer and run it from there:
wget -O speedtest-cli https://raw.github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest_cli.py chmod +x speedtest-cli |
or
curl -o speedtest-cli https://raw.github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest_cli.py chmod +x speedtest-cli |
Basic Usage
You can simply run the command speedtest_cli.py without any option and you’ll get a report on the terminal of your bandwidth speed, this is the output of my crappy Italian Adsl:
$ ./speedtest_cli.py Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Testing from Telecom Italia (87.13.73.66)... Selecting best server based on latency... Hosted by LepidaSpA (Bologna) [12.20 km]: 104.347 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 6.35 Mbits/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 0.34 Mbits/s
So this is the basic usage, and it’s good enough to know how great (or bad) is your connection, but maybe you want to share this information with your friends, to do this just use the option –share
./speedtest_cli.py --share Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Testing from Telecom Italia (87.13.73.66)... Selecting best server based on latency... Hosted by LepidaSpA (Bologna) [12.20 km]: 93.778 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 6.20 Mbits/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 0.33 Mbits/s Share results: http://www.speedtest.net/result/3700218352.png
This will produce an image similar to this one (but I hope for you with better values):
Another interesting option it’s the –list that shows a list of speedtest.net servers sorted by distance, these are my results:
Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... 2872) LepidaSpA (Bologna, Italy) [12.20 km] 1561) MYNETWAY S.R.L. (Cesena, Italy) [80.97 km] 2710) ReteIVO by D.t.s. Srl (Florence, Italy) [90.90 km] 4826) Inteplanet Srl (Verona, Italy) [100.45 km] 3998) Wolnext srl (Verona, Italy) [100.45 km] 2957) Wifiweb s.r.l. (Altavilla Vicentina, Italy) [103.11 km] 3103) E4A s.r.l. (Vicenza, Italy) [107.17 km] 3804) Interplanet Srl (Vicenza, Italy) [107.17 km] 1014) NTRnet (Vicenza, Italy) [107.17 km] 3679) Hynet s r l (Vicenza, Italy) [107.17 km] 3745) Comeser Srl (Fidenza, Italy) [114.00 km] 5011) Welcomeitalia spa (Massarosa, Italy) [119.26 km] 2864) ReteIVO by D.t.s. Srl (Massa, Italy) [120.92 km] 2918) ReteIVO by D.t.s. Srl (Arezzo, Italy) [129.79 km] ...
Now that I know the ID of the servers that are located near my location I can pick up a specific server with the option –server, so to chose the server located at Florence (ID 2710) I can use the command:
./speedtest_cli.py --server 2710 Retrieving speedtest.net configuration... Retrieving speedtest.net server list... Testing from Telecom Italia (87.13.73.66)... Hosted by ReteIVO by D.t.s. Srl (Florence) [90.90 km]: 106.505 ms Testing download speed........................................ Download: 6.18 Mbits/s Testing upload speed.................................................. Upload: 0.35 Mbits/s
Article sponsored by Asapy Programming Company
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This is interesting but not necessary. Anybody can browse to http://www.speedtest.net – which is apparently the service this tool uses – for a very nice GUI that provides choices and records history.
That’s correct, but you could use the script to setup a cron and check the speedtime at different time of the day.
Or use it on servers without graphical interface.
This tool is not for those people.
That’s not true. Some people are running in a cli without a display, and while it’s true that they probably have other devices that are capable of going to speedtest.net, for them it’s easier to just use a command. They could also be lacking flash player, which speedtest requires.
Even for me, on a graphical display, it’s faster to press ctl+alt+t, then type out the command, than it is to access the site normally.
nice one!