Of late, our broadband internet has been feeling sluggish. A call to the company took way more hold-time than I wanted to spend, and it only fixed the problem for a short while. Thus a perfect opportunity to play with some new tech to solve a problem, in this case, documenting a systemic issue from a service provider.

The goal – a log a internet speeds, taken say every 15 min. Recording ping time, upload speed, download speed, and local LAN usage.

The solution

• A WCF service to measure speeds
• Internet speed was measured via speedtest.net
• LAN usage was measured by querying my router for packets received and sent
• A SQL express instance to persist the data
• A PowerShell script to invoke the WCF service – launched by Windows’ Task Scheduler
• An OData WCF Data Service to allow me to read the data
• MS PowerPivot to show a nice viz (scratch that, the beta expired)
• LinqPad to get the data, export it to excel
• Tableau Public to show the viz