I am a (unhappy) Comcast customer and there is no other service that I can get in my area. I have to teleword and do required high-speed connection. Problem is that I feel many times I am being throttled for even stuff like Youtube videos, remote login etc.<p>So, anyone here knows tools etc. to see whether my ISP is throttling me? I pay for 30mbps down. Is there a tool to sample that at given intervals to see if I do get what I pay for?<p>Any other thoughts on this subject are also appreciated.
The "easiest" solution requires some learning. The netstat(1) command on
unix-based systems (including MacOS 10+) and possibly also ms-windows
can report the number of <i>BYTES</i> passing through a network interface. On
most implementations the '-b' switch is used to show <i>BYTES</i> and the '-I
ifacename' switch is used to define what interface you want to monitor.
Since this only gives you one count of the bytes, you also want to use
the "wait" switch, typically '-w #" so the command continuously runs
every "#" seconds.<p><pre><code> $ netstat -bI tun0 -w 8
</code></pre>
The reason to use a wait time of 8 seconds is the values you'll see will
be roughly equivalent to <i>BITS</i> per second for the given 8 second
period (1 byte is 8 bits). Since most networking throughput is measured
in bits per second, this makes your life easy. Also, using a wait time
of 8 seconds avoids putting mostly pointless load on your system while
giving you a fairly solid average throughput value.<p>This method is very flexible. For example, if you're running one or more
VPN tunnels, you can monitor each tunnel individually, as well as the
underlying uplink connection. You just need to use the same command with
different '-I' interface names.<p>Additionally, unlike the inaccurate download speed values presented by
web browsers and similar applications, this is measuring the raw data
passing through the interface (i.e. with packet overhead), rather than
measuring how fast a file is being transfered (without packet overhead).<p>I just leave it running in a tmux window on my firewall so with just a
glance I can always see what the connection is doing.
Have you tried any of the speed test sites, for example <a href="http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/" rel="nofollow">http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/</a>. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks ISPs know all the speed test sites and will not throttle speed test packets.
pchar gives really detailed statistics about each hop. I'd recommend running it ~every hour for a few weeks to spot patterns in what is happening: <a href="http://www.kitchenlab.org/www/bmah/Software/pchar/" rel="nofollow">http://www.kitchenlab.org/www/bmah/Software/pchar/</a><p>Robtex.com can also be good for examining how autonomous systems interconnect.