I am having problems with my isp--at&t.

AT&T in our area changed recently to fiber optics, and since then, although the down speed is supposed to be 6Mb, the down speed slows down to a fraction of this on occassions, and, also, ever since the change to fiber optics I started having connectivity problems (some URLs take forever to connect to--have to reload many times) that I did not experience before the switch, even though the down speed I had before was much lower.

Is there a simple way of how I could monitor AND record my down speed from at&t and whatever there is to determine my connections quality?

Thanks, Hearthstone.

Well, you could use

That will give you some indication of rate, just by looking at how much it's downloaded at what time.

Alternatively, you can use

This gives you more indepth stats, but it uses a carriage return rather than a line feed ('\r' not '\n') so you'll need to convert those before it will look nice in most text editors

Hope this helps,

Hi hearthstone,

I have battled for years with ISPs about download speed. My current ISP Centyrylink (used to be Embarq) has generally been doing a good job. However, I still need to keep an eye on them sometimes. They have an ftp site for testing purposes. I test against it so as to remove one variable. It prevents their Tech Support folks from blaming the issue on some other speed test resource which I am testing against. That said, I would ask AT&T if they have a similar facility.

Here is a script I have setup to do testing at the click of the mouse I have added a reference into my .netrc file to provide the credentials When I run the script it displays the up and down speed stats and then will exit when I press <Enter>.

On occasion I have modified the script to log the stats. Remove the "read" statement so it will close when done. Then schedule a job to run the command "speedtest.sh >> speed.log" (of course supply the paths to the script and the log file). Run it every so often and you will have some data to club Tech Support with.

Feel free to post back if you need any help sorting out the script.

Ken

p.s. Add a line such as to the beginning of the script to document when each test run was started.

I should explain in more depth what it is that I want:
I was with AT&T for a couple of years and had the very basic DSL connection from them (very cheap--about $15.-/mo) and I was not very unhappy with it, even though the downspeed was only around 1/2 Mbs/s.

I went away to a different area with a different ISP and it was about the same with them. After a year came back, signed up with AT&T again, but now they have U-verse (fiber optics) with a downspeed of 6 Mbs/s, and although downloading is much faster on occasions, very often there is no connection at all, or some URLs do connect OK, but others (notably Yahoo, and sometimes Google) take tens of minutes to connect.

They did offer to test my connection at my place, but it would cost me $55.- a visit if they determined if the fault would lie with me--something that very rarely happens, they assured me, but for me it still would be a costly gamble; and what if the download speed was OK at the time of their visit?; nothing would be resolved then.

I don't know if the poor connectivity is really caused by them--the only way I could find out would be to sign up with a local Linux friendly ISP that I also had in the past, but had to give up, because the cost $40.- /mo.

However, I am considering going back to them, if I can be reasonably sure that my current problems with the fluctuating downspeed and the frequent bad connectivity is really caused by them.

So I need something that would monitor AND record the overall performance of AT&T, and also, somehow, that would prove that the bad connectivity that I experience with some URLs is caused by them.

Thanks, Hearthstone.

To monitor the performance of AT&T, well actually the performance of AT&T's connection between the Internet and you, there must be some traffic flowing. An ftp test is a simple way to do that. I do not know if Centurylink restricts their ftp site to Centurylink IP addresses. It is easy enough to find out. Try the following manually in a terminalIf that works you can script the process as I described previously, schedule the script and log the results. If you download the 1 MB file every 15 minutes for a couple of days and have a look at the results you should be able to document what is going on with the raw connection speed.

From the symptoms you describe it sounds like there may be a DNS resolution issue. I would recommend changing your DNS to something like OpenDNS. http://www.opendns.com/ and see if that improves things.

To step back a little... What do you have in place as far as a home network? Obviously there is a DSL modem. Do you have a router? Multiple PCs? If so, do you experience the issue on all PCs?

Ken

I use the vnstat to monitor/log total downloaded/uploaded bytes on my ISP connection (combined with conky for real time visuals and with a web script for extra data visualizations).

I think it can log speeds too.

1 members found this post helpful.

I consider this post as SOLVED--found vnstat as something that I, with my limited capabilities, can handle, perhaps ...

Thank you all!!

Sincerely - Hearthstone.