Notes and Ramblings

Bandwidth Tester Mozilla Extension by Jeremy Gillick
From the author: "This is a mozilla extension that tells you the bandwidth of your current internet connection. It is very useful if you have a laptop and use it in different areas and networks frequently.
This tool is more accurate than many of the website testers because it downloads several files at different sizes to find your average connection speed. However, this is also dependant on where you are in relation to where the test files are being served from. You can change the test files used in the Bandwidth Tester options."

I've installed this on my laptop at the office as well as my USB drive with Portable Firefox for testing network response from various sites and machines.
Here are a few screen-shots of Bandwidth Tester on my machine.

After installing it and restarting your browser, click Tools -> Bandwidth Tester.


Here is the interface we see when Bandwidth Tester opens.


Checking the Options screen we see that it's pulling files from the author's home page.


After running, you can see I'm getting ~533.5 Kbps (hmm, not so great today)


I'll use cURL to d/l the same files to my page on the local network...


and set the Options to use the local copy...


and BAM! now we're getting some network response!