To rate the performance of my ISP I want to measure the performance of my internet connection over the day. This should be done automatically over at least a week time to see variations in time of day and working day or weekend day. The speed should be 3 Mb/s.

I started this with a wget download of a 1 MB file from the Debian web site (Debian reference manual) every 5 minutes. With the proper parameters wget produces output which I could turn into a spreadsheet input file after some grep/sed/awk sequence. No problem here.

However, download speed is always around 145 kB/s, without much variation, while I know my download speeds are usually higher. Apparently Debian is limiting the speed of a single stream.

Besides, during the process I realized that I should not perform this test download from an open source site as those people are not waiting from someone wasting their bandwidth for nothing. Sorry!

Then I changed the downloaded file to the DirectX9 update from Microsoft. That felt much better, really This file is 1.4 MB in size.

The download of this file is very steady at 444 kB/s with some occasional dips. However, I cannot translate this speed to one of the service plans of my ISP. So I have no idea whether this is the speed limitation of my connection, or policy of the host site to limit the speed of a stream.

Does someone know a better tool to do these measurements over a period of time? Is there any host which will allow me to download files where the speed is not limited at the host end? I have googled and there are numerous web sites which can do a speed test, but that is not what I am looking for. It should be a downloadable file.

jlinkels

How about the ftp from your provider, or your free website at the provider ?
You should choose a ftp server near you.

If you have ADSL and a router, you should be able to see the data rate
mine is
This is on a 24 Mbps line.

For DSL, the speed also depends on your internal cabling

I am not looking at my ADSL speed, but at the effective speed to the internet.

Downloading from a local site is questionable. First they don't exist with upload speeds over 2 Mbps, secondly that would still be the intranet of my ISP, as we have just one ISP. For example, my ping to google is around 120 ms. My ping to my VPN server on the island is 40 ms.

The number my modem gives is not usable. It tells me what the ADSL bit rate is, not my connection speed to the internet. My connection speed is 15+ Mbps, but that is not my access speed to the Internet.

jlinkels