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 fast.com. It’s an online test tool which can be installed and run from the terminal in Linux.

How to install and use fast.com from the terminal

The installation is simple we just have to download the latest release make it executable and run it. You can find the best release for your system here.

# How to install and use fast.com from the terminal ?
$ curl -L https://github.com/ddo/fast/releases/download/v0.0.4/fast_linux_amd64 -o fast
# OR
$ wget https://github.com/ddo/fast/releases/download/v0.0.4/fast_linux_amd64 -O fast

#
# then chmod
$chmod +x fast

#
# run
 fast
$./fast
Code language: PHP (php)

For Ubuntu there is a easy install command using the snap package manager.

# How to install and use fast.com on Ubuntu Linux from the terminal ?
$ snap install fast
Code language: PHP (php)

Conclusion

That’s all! In this article, we have explained how to check the current Internet download and upload speed of Linux systems using the Fast.com speed testing service.

• 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.