How can I measure my bandwidth?

Today, 1st March 2006, my ISP decided to change my internet bandwidth from 1 megabit downstream / 256 kilobits upstream to "2.5megabits".

Of course, they weren't saying how much upstream they were giving me so, instead of calling, I wanted to proactively check my internet connection.

I fired up Firefox and typed some keywords on Google Search, and got some fine results, but there was one who caught my eye: http://www.auditmypc.com/internet-speed-test.asp - It uses a Java application (by the way, I use blackdown for my Java Runtime Environment, which works perfectly along with Firefox 1.5.0.1). This java application show two nicely drawn speed-o-meters.
After testing your bandwidth, by making the Java application receive and send some data, your downstream and upstream speed is shown.

I got more than 3.2mbits downstream, and 261.5kbps upstream.

Of course, I checked this by directly plugging my cablemodem to my ethernet nic (I have a Netgear wireless router in the middle), and stopped all services that could have been eating bandwidth (The bwmon utility proves to be an excellent ally at the console when checking out these kinds of things).

So, I have to say, apart from charging me $5 less.... it works quite well! Let's see what happens in the next days.

If you have any URLs, applications or procedure that you think may be of use for these kind of situations, reply to this post!

Yours,
Arturo Busleiman