Measure the speed of your network connection from the terminal

We are going to teach you with this simple trick to measure the speed of your network connection from the terminal, without depending on the web apps that you can find on the Internet that have oscillations that can give unreliable data.

To measure the speed of your connection you just have to have installed a small application called speedtest-cli. To obtain this package you must type the following in the console:

wget -O speedtest-cli https://raw.github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest_cli.py

Once downloaded, we can only change the execution permissions of the program like this (or you can do it in graphic mode if you wish, by clicking with the right mouse button on the downloaded file and in Properties the permissions are modified to add the possibility of execution):

chmod +x speedtest-cli

This will give you execution permissions. Now we can run it as a scripts (We must do this from the directory where the downloaded file is located):

./speedtest-cli --simple

At that moment the test begins to measure the speed of descent and ascent in Mbits / s. If, for example, you are doing a test of your connection and you want to share it with a friend to show him your results or with a technician to help you detect a problem in the contracted speed, you just have to execute this (instead of the above):

./speedtest-cli --share

Then you will do the test and create a PNG image so you can share it with the printed results. By the way, if we use the run command without the –simple attribute, the result will be somewhat more detailed.