Howsmywifi NPM

How's My WiFi

Measure (repeatedly) your broadband speed using Fast.com in a headless browser.

Yes, WiFi isn't broadband and broadband isn't WiFi but ultimately, what is the speed you get on Fast.com? That's the speed of your connection to the Interwebs. The WiFi from your laptop to your router is unlikely to be the bottleneck so this ultimately measures your broadband.

This is a NodeJS script that opens Fast.com, written by Netflix, with a headless browser, hangs on till it gets a speed measurement. Then it records this number in a local database.

You run it like this (if you installed it globally):

howsmywifi

Running it once is about as useful as opening a browser tab to https://fast.com. To really get your money's worth, loop it like this:

howsmywifi --loop

...then wait. Let it run for a couple of minutes and bask in the glorious line chart that indicates your Internet Flash Gordonness.

The goal is to comprehend how your Internet speed is fluctuating. Perhaps Comcast is telling, for $100 a month you get "Up to 75Gbps" but what good is that if it turns out it hovers around 0.5Gbps most of the time?

How Does It Work

It uses puppeteer to open https://fast.com in a headless Chrome browser. It then waits until that app has managed to calculate your Internet speed. If it takes longer than 30 seconds, it'll error out with a timeout.

If you run it with the --loop flag, it'll repeatedly do this operation over and over with some sleep in between (default is 5 min) and print out a graph with a moving average on it.

All speed measurements are recorded in a local sqlite3 file. This is useful for getting historical insights.

How To Install It

With npm:

npm install howsmywifi

With yarn:

yarn add howsmywifi

Or, globally, with npm:

npm install -g howsmywifi

Or, globally, with yarn (recommanded):

yarn global add howsmywifi

How To Run It

Basic operation is:

./node_modules/.bin/howsmywifi

That will give you, after a couple of seconds, a speed value. The more interesting thing is to run it repeatedly so a moving average can tell you what your speed is: