How do you do a command line speed test?

Speedtesting is one of the first steps that can make us erect the antennas (ours and those of the home modem if necessary). In fact, a speed test is able to let us know how fast the home internet is currently going.

Why not a traditional speed test?

So far you will tell me: yes, what’s new? Why should I go for a command line speed test when I could safely do one using a normal browser?

The answer is that the browser can also greatly influence the tests that we would normally do with traditional speed tests . Having many tabs open, with perhaps extensions or plugins, can affect our user experience by making us perceive slow sites as faster because maybe they don’t load advertising or maybe, remaining in the context of tests, going to implant a card open while speed control is in progress.

Doing a command line speed test excludes all these problems: of course, to have a good test we should rely on many more statistics, but at least we should be able to get a clearer first idea about the situation of our line.

The speed test in pills

Our goal is to install, configure and use the official CLI Speed ​​Tests in order to start a command line speed test regardless of the system we are using on our computer.

Total Time: 30 minutes

We download and install the CLIs

We go to the Speedtest site, in the precision we have to go to the page where the Speedtest CLI speech is deepened, or here .

We install the CLIs in the system

Scrolling down the previous page we will notice a dedicated section that will show us exactly the commands to execute. The download mentioned below will provide us with an executable to open without too many problems.

We find the closest server

Through the speedtest -L command we will be able to list all the servers closest to us, what we are interested in is the ID code that we will have to write down for the next step

Let’s run the speed test

Leaving the speeedtest -s id command, we will start the speedtest. Download speeds, upload speeds, network latency and jitter will be checked. Then we will be given the results

Let’s check the result

At the end of the test the console will display all the complete information. In addition to them, the report will be uploaded to the speedtest.net website and through the result url we will be able to see the same result with attractive graphics and save it for a later time.

If you want to watch the test obtained from the image link, just click here , I have saved it for you.

And specifically?

We install the CLI for your operating system

A command line / terminal speed test can be done using a CLI (Command Line Interface) or a sort of program made specifically to communicate with the Windows terminal, MacOS or Unix installations such as Ubuntu.

For this guide I have chosen to rely on the Speedtest.net CLI which is compatible with all major operating systems.

For Windows there are no combinations to be made directly from the terminal. It is therefore necessary to download the external application which then started will behave exactly like CLI for macOs and Unix environments.

For MacOS just open the terminal and type the following commands in sequence:

brew tap teamookla/speedtest

brew update

brew install speedtest –force

For Ubuntu and Debian systems you need to follow these steps:

sudo apt-get install gnupg1 apt-transport-https dirmngr

export INSTALL_KEY=379CE192D401AB61

export DEB_DISTRO=$(lsb_release -sc)

sudo apt-key adv –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com –recv-keys $INSTALL_KEY

echo “deb https://ookla.bintray.com/debian ${DEB_DISTRO} main” | sudo tee  /etc/apt/sources.list.d/speedtest.list

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install speedtest

If instead we use Fedora, CentOS or RedHat we will have to do these steps:

sudo yum install wget

wget https://bintray.com/ookla/rhel/rpm -O bintray-ookla-rhel.repo

sudo mv bintray-ookla-rhel.repo /etc/yum.repos.d/

sudo yum install speedtest

For FreeBSD, however, these two command lines are sufficient:

sudo pkg update && sudo pkg install -g libidn2 ca_root_nss

sudo pkg add “https://bintray.com/ookla/download/download_file?file_path=ookla-speedtest-1.0.0-freebsd.pkg”

Let’s learn the necessary commands

Speedtest CLI is equipped with various commands, in the table below I have retrieved the most common ones so as to facilitate their use