I built the free and open source internet-pi project on GitHub. If you just spot check by running a Speedtest every now and then, you don't have much data to go on. Having a Pi monitoring my Internet continuously makes it easy to see trends over time, or confirm outages. The Internet Pi runs Pi-hole for DNS privacy and ad-blocking, and Prometheus and Grafana to provide Internet connection monitoring dashboards. WiFi, especially on the Pi, fluctuates quite a bit and is terrible for monitoring anything besides maybe WiFi signal strength. The most important thing for measuring a network connection is that it's wired. I have it installed in a rack (here's a video on the Pi rack), but it could just as easily be on my desk, or sitting by my Internet router. I have a video that goes along with this blog post, and it's embedded below skip past it if you prefer reading over viewing. I just like having a dedicated computer to run all my Internet connection tools, so it's easy to backup or replace, and it doesn't get bogged down.

Well, I do, thanks to a $35 Raspberry Pi! And you don't even need a Pi, you could run the software I use on any computer. And are you really getting the speeds you pay for? You probably don't know. Some would die for those speeds (see the map above), but much of the world is better off. And that's the highest plan that costs about $150 a month! Louis-where I guess I should count my lucky stars we have 'high use' broadband available-I have only two options: I can get 'gigabit' cable Internet from Spectrum, or 75 megabit DSL from AT&T.Īnd you're probably thinking, 'Gigabit Internet is great, stop complaining!'īut Spectrum's 'gigabit' Internet is 930 megabits down-in ideal conditions-but only 40 megabits up. A recently-released map of broadband availability in the US paints a pretty dire picture: They've pushed for the FCC to continue defining 25 Mbps as 'high use' broadband, and on top of that they overstate the quality of service they provide. Internet Service Providers are almost universally despised.

Monitor internet uptime