Now one of the things that every modern person wants to know about his internet connection is the network speed. Most people don’t even know if 60 Megabits is a good or bad speed but they know more is better. So in order to understand network speed we have to understand what is good and bad speed? But how to do this in a really short and not boring way? The easy way is to trust us and take our word that speeds grater than 75 Megabits per second are great for home and watching 4k online TV and so on.

For the more curious readers there is an article on Wikipedia explaining network speeds which you can read from here.

Now your network speed is divided in two parts, the first part is the external network speed ( the speed after your home router ) and internal speed ( the speed that your home network runs at ). In this article we are interested in our speed after the router ( The speed that the network provider is selling us ) so that we can check if we are getting what they are selling to us. For this to be accurate we have to accept that the internal network speed ( our home LAN ) is capable of reaching the provided by the provider speeds ( for example if we have a 200 Megabit provided to our router, the router has to be capable to operate at gigabit speeds ).

One of the most popular network speed test tools is speedtest.net. It’s an online test tool which we are going to review first.

Article Content:

• How to check network speed using speedtest.net ?
  – Use sppedtest.net cli tool
• How to check network speed using fast.com ?
  – Use fast.net cli tool
• How to check network speed using nperf.com ?
  – Use wget as a cli tool
• How to check SSH network speed?
• Conclusion
• How long does your Linux system take to boot?

How to check network speed using speedtest.net ?

Speedtest.net is a very simple and reliable way to check your network speed. It’s an online platform world wide used and can run in a simple click. Just open the site click on the Go button and wait for the download and upload to finish then you are going to see the results.

What you see from the results in this example is that the connection had a ping of 3ms which is good ( ping greater than 10 ms is considered not good ). The download and upload speed where around 70 Megabits which is an average network speed. You can also find out what is you IP address and so on.

Speedtest.net provides a tool that offers a way for you to check the network speed from the terminal. You can check it from HERE for a install and review guide.

How to check network speed using fast.com ?

Fast.com is very simple to use, you don’t have to even click something to make it work and test your connection. Just open the site from HERE and it will automatically test your internet connection speed like in the following screenshot:

The two cool things about fast.com is first that it is powered by Netflix and the second cool this is that you can use it to check the network speed from the terminal using the fast-cli app. In order to use fast-cli in Ubuntu you have to install it using the snap app store.

# How to install fast-cli in Ubuntu 21.04 using snap?
$ sudo apt install nodejs
$ sudo snap install fast-cli

# How to use fast-cli ?
$ fast
Code language: PHP (php)

How to check network speed using nperf.com ?

Nperf.com aims to change the game in network testing with a new technology that is more efficient to calculate download and upload speeds and also network latency. You can visit nperf.com from HERE. And here is a screenshot of what to expect:

Now iperf doesn’t have a cli like speedtest.net and fast.net but where is a will there is a way. A very nice trick to check the network speed through the command line is wget. Wget is a cli tool for downloading files but can be used to check the speed like in the following example:

# Check network speed using wget in Ubuntu 21.04 Linux
wget https://releases.ubuntu.com/20.04.2.0/ubuntu-20.04.2.0-desktop-amd64.iso
Code language: PHP (php)

Here while downloading the Ubuntu ISO image we will see the download speed of our connection. Now this is not the best way of doing things we really advice you to use all of the above measurement tools but never the less wget is a clever way for checking the network speed.

How to check SSH network speed?

Have you ever wondered what is the speed of your ssh connection. For example you are connected to a server in Dubai but you live in London and now you want to know what is the speed if you need to scp something. Well the solution to this problem is called PV.

You can read about it in This Article.

Conclusion

In this article we reviewed several ways to check our network speed connection using the web browser or the terminal.

Personally I always use the speedtest.net command line tool but if I have to check the network speed in a network and computer where I don’t have the possibility to use the cli tool the second of my choices will be the fast.com website where without even a single clicking at all they give me the fastest and most needed information. For a local speed test I usually use wget or iperf to check the internal speed and also the disk write speed. It’s cool because you check the network speed and the computer disk write speed. Keep in mind that the internal network speed can be affected by a slow running disk drive either by the downloading pc or the uploading pc so it’s not a perfect measurement but one that can tell you the current hardware and network status of your environment.

• Another article that you may like: How long does your Linux system take to boot?
  ——————————————————————————————————–

If you know other cool ways to check the network speed, please tell us in the comments bellow.

We hope you enjoyed this article. if that is so please rate this page with the stars bellow and subscribe to our YouTube channel or follow us on twiter.