Chaps,

Can traceroute or ping be used as a "poor mans" ADSL speed test? I can think of some fairly good hosts to ping but will any times listed by those commands accurately reflect my ADSL speed? I'm guessing that a number of hosts would have to be contacted and averaged or something...

Latency and bandwidth have absolutely nothing to do with each other. You can have extremely low latency on a dial-up connection, and very high latency on a broadband connection (think satellite Internet). Latency is determined by the number of intermediate hops between you and your destination, not how fast your connection to that destination is.

If you are looking for a quick way to estimate your bandwidth, just download a file from a fast server with wget. It will give you an average speed at the end which would at least give you an idea of what you are dealing with.

Thanks for clearing this up for me. So essentially I'd have to wget some file each time I wanted to determine my bandwidth? -Mode- bummer as I was thinking of writing a tiny tool for this. project over.