My ISP has been throttling Bit Torrents for a while now. It seems that two-three weeks ago they started throttling my SSH/VPN connections as well. (Although they won't admit to it)

They keep going to a http speed test and saying "see your internet is fine". Does anyone out there know a speed test that goes encrypted, either through SSH or SSL type connections?

I want something more concrete to work with.

Pipe /dev/random to a file, get 5 or 10 megs worth of data. Use the time command and scp the file to a host that's fairly close, preferably the first hop off of your ISP's network.

When the upload is complete, the time command will tell you how long the upload took to complete. Divide size in bytes by seconds, you get upload speed. Do the same for download. You might want to try this several times and take the mean.

Since the files being uploaded are random bits, they won't compress; this should give you accurate data rates.

Note, you might want to try /dev/urandom; this generates data much faster.

/dev/urandom is good to know thanks. My only problem now is where do I upload/download it. I only have one machine out in the internet which I have SSH access to and they limit my download to 200kb/s Which is no good to do tests on.

Any ideas?

Here's a bash script to test your SSH connection speed, upload and download: http://www.alecjacobson.com/weblog/?p=635