Knowing the speed and quality of the WiFi connection in our home or office is essential to know if we will be able to perform certain tasks (downloads, streaming, video calls, etc.). There are several ways to find out this information. Here we explain How to measure your internet speed with CMD commands in Windows.
The CMD or Symbol of the system is a tool that allows any Windows user to run text commands to perform different tasks or solve certain problems. It will also be of great help to us in this case.
The key to what we are looking for lies in use some built-in tools like ping o netstatThey will not directly provide us with an accurate measurement of the download or upload speed, but they can help us analyze the latency and connectivity of the connection. Let's see how we can use them and what they can be useful for.
Before that, let's remember that you can access the Command Prompt with the Windows + R key combination or through the Windows start menu search engine by typing "cmd" in the box. This will open the familiar black command window.
«ping» command
The first resource we have to measure the internet speed through CMD is the command ping. This is used to measure the latency of the connection. In other words: to determine the time it takes a packet of information to travel from our computer to a server on the Internet and back.
To run it, you have to write ping followed by a trusted web address. For example:
ping www.google.com
Through this action, Four data packets will be sent to the Google server, which will return the round trip time (RTT or Round Trip Time) expressed in milliseconds. The lower this value, the faster the connection.
In the example we have used (see image above), the average time is 22 ms, which is indicative of low latency, which is a positive data.
«netstat» command
Another very useful command that we can use to measure internet speed with CMD is netstat. It helps us to be able to know which network connections are activatedAs well as statistics for each connection. It is true that it does not provide us with direct data on the Internet speed, although knowing how many connections are active on our computer can give us a clue.
The command to use to know what the active connections is this:
netstat
On the other hand, we can use this specific command to know a summary of the statistics of packets sent and received on the network interface:
netstat -e
«speedtest» command
A more precise way to find the data we are looking for is to use the command speedtestHowever, before you can use it, you need to access the official website of Speed Test CLI and from there download the tool for Windows. Then you have to unzip the file and save the executable in a folder that is accessible from the Command Prompt.
Once this is done, we can now open the command line, open the folder where the speedtest.exe file has been saved and run speed test writing the following:
speedtest
In the result that will appear on the screen we will be able to see all the parameters that are normally used to measure the internet speed. Thus, in our CMD the values of latency, upload speed and download speed will be shown. We will also be able to see the percentage of information requested, which to be considered perfect should be zero.
Ultimately, this is the command that will provide us with the precise and detailed information we need.
Other useful Command Prompt commands
From the CMD command line we can execute many other actions and queries about our operating system. The key is to know which command to use for each thing. And since we will not always be able to memorize them all, here you have a list of the most important ones and their respective functions:
- cd: Change directory and show the current directory.
- class: Clear Command Prompt page results.
- chkdsk: Examine the selected drive and detect possible errors.
- cmd: Open a new Command Prompt window.
- copy: Copy files to a new location.
- data: Change the system date.
- of the: Delete files.
- dir: Show all files and folders inside the current folder.
- exit: Close Command Prompt.
- find: Find a text string in a file.
- help: Access the list of all available commands.
- ipconfig: Basic information about our computer.
- label: Label a disk drive.
- md: Create a new directory.
- move: Move files or directories.
- pause: Suspend an ongoing process.
- print: To print.
- rd: Delete a directory.
- recover: Recover the contents of a file.
- ren: Rename a file.
- sfc / scannow: Scan all system files.
- shutdown: Turn off the PC.
- start: Open a single window to run a program.