In the image, the -x 4 is how many parallel connections we wish to use. To use aria2 we fist need to download it: sudo apt-get install aria2 The downside of wget is the lack of parallel connections. Never test only from the same site as this can be affected by your distance to it, any problem in the server and the connections to it, etc. You need to have at least 4 or 5 different testing sources to have a more accurate speed. This will help you have a more accurate check. You need to do the test at least 5 times to have a reliable speed check or at least do it for a minute or two. If your connection is 512KB and the place where you are downloading is 400KB, your max connection will be 400KB because it is the max for the server you are downloading from. The highest speed you will see is the maximum speed that your connection and the server's connection can offer. In the case of my link the speed is less than 200KB so if you have a higher speed, the server will be the bottleneck for you, not your actual speed. Of course there are several recommendations: Typing: wget would start to download the Ubu1.avi file and show at what speed it is downloading. To use it just point to a file in internet that is relatively bigger so that you can get a better estimate of it. That little tool tells me nicely what speed I have. For Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial) and later use: sudo apt install speedtest-cli Speedtest-cli is in Ubuntu repositories now. Using pip install -user speedtest-cli gets you a version that is probably newer than the one available from your distribution's repositories. Hosted by FiberCloud, Inc (Seattle, WA) : 44.028 ms The short version is this: (no root required) curl -s | python. I created a blog post ( Measure Internet Connection Speed from the Linux Command Line) that goes into detail of downloading, installing and usage of it. I recommend the speedtest-cli tool for this.

Download speed test internet connection