Measuring Internet Speed In Python Using Speedtest-cli

SpeedTest.net is an excellent website that lets you measure your internet upload and download speed. It’s useful for checking the performance either for fault finding purposes or to see if you are getting the service promised by your ISP.

Matt Martz has created a Python project called speedtest-cli which allows you to do a basic upload/download measurement using SpeedNet’s infrastructure. It works fine on the Pi and is really easy to try out on the command line.

Installation

Downloading the utility is easy if you clone the projects git repository :

git clone https://github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli.git

Running SpeedTest

To run the script you need to navigate to the directory :

cd speedtest-cli

and then run the Python script :

python speedtest_cli.py

The script will run and you should see something like this :

If you add –share to the command like this :

python speedtest_cli.py --share

it will create a link to an online image showing your results which you can share with your friends/family/enemies.

Here’s mine :

The results are slightly lower than the test on my main PC but this is to be expected as 85Mb/s is approaching the maximum data rate of the Pi’s 100Mb/s Ethernet port.

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If you haven’t ever visited SpeedTest.net give it a try on your PC, Mac or laptop. Be sure to hit the oval “Begin Test” button in the centre of the page map rather than other buttons which may be adverts.