How do I check the internet speed inside Ubuntu 14.04

Solution 1:

indicator-netspeed works nice

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install indicator-netspeed

You can watch the internet speed in top panel and it takes less space in top panel.

Solution 2:

Observing the current upload and download rate is fairly easy in Ubuntu. The easiest option is to use the System Monitor, but you can do it through the console as well.

GUI Option

Ubuntu comes with an application called System Monitor, which acts like the Windows Task Manager. To open it, search for "System Monitor" in your dash and start up the proper application. Select the Resources tab and you should see CPU History, Memory and Swap History, and Network History. What you want is the network history, which should show your current upload/download rates, as well as a graph of them over time.

Command-Line Option

Alternatively, you may want to test your speeds. To do this, you could use SpeedTest.net or wget. The latter is a Terminal command. To use it, enter wget in the console and provide it with a download URL as an argument (i.e. wget http://download.org/download.tar.gz). You should choose a fairly large file you know to have good speeds. Once you've done that, you can observe your download speed from the console. Feel free to delete the downloaded file afterwards. If you ran the command immediately after starting Terminal, it will be in your home directory.

Solution 3:

speedtest-cli is Command line interface for testing internet bandwidth using speedtest.net. It uses python. You can download and run it like so:

wget https://raw.github.com/sivel/speedtest-cli/master/speedtest_cli.py
chmod a+rx speedtest_cli.py
sudo mv speedtest_cli.py /usr/local/bin/
sudo chown root:root /usr/local/bin/speedtest_cli.py

Solution 4:

The best thing is to open system monitor and look in resources or you can install Cairo-Dock and use netspeed.