Your ISP is Lying to You

Your ISP is lying to you. Here is how to prove it.

Most speedtest tools are fucking useless.

The industry standard, speedtest-cli, has been dead since 2021. Homebrew is currently in the process of tossing it in the trash because it is unmaintained. For years, we have been relying on a tool that, when a probe failed, simply reported it as taking exactly 30 minutes.

Thirty minutes.

Because that is a perfectly reasonable number for a ping.

I got tired of it, so I wrote spdng. It is a from-scratch replacement that does everything the old one did, but actually correctly.

It does not measure latency on a cold connection, so you get the real round trip instead of the TCP handshake cost. It follows HTTP redirects, so the probes actually land. And it picks the nearest server instead of some random node 1,700km away just because it felt like it.

I also added an mtr-style per-hop trace. Now you can see exactly which router in some godforsaken data center is eating your packets. You can also test against Ookla, Cloudflare, and LibreSpeed side-by-side to figure out if your link is actually slow or if the route just sucks.

The best part? It has zero dependencies. It is just Python and spite.

It is on PyPI. It is in a Homebrew tap.

Use it, or keep believing your ISP is giving you the gigabit you pay for. Your call.