quoting breathnach proinnsias dublin breatpro exchange ie ml com is there any reliable way to calculate your connection speed if you don t trust what the modem reports do a wget of a file of known length in a script that runs date before and after or equivalent be aware that speed between you and your upstream link is one thing speed through countless congested routers to a faraway location may be quite another remember that hardware level compression is a factor the file you wget will probably be precompressed in the area of the slightly more exotic be aware that different traffic may have higher priority and thus more available bandwidth at various points in the transit to from you and that some traffic may go via different paths coming vs going be aware that raw bulk transfer speed may not be the only thing that matters depending on what you re doing the modem s connection latency might matter and this differs widely between modems it matters more for interactive sessions e g ssh remote logins where each keystroke is echoed from remote cheers send a policeman and have it arrested rick moen otto von bismarck when asked what he rick URL would do if the british army landed irish linux users group ilug URL URL for un subscription information list maintainer listmaster URL 