Re: Can nm provide connection speed ?

[Dan Williams <dcbw redhat com>]

On Mon, 2008-11-03 at 00:06 +0100, thibaut bethune wrote:
> Some softwares requires to know what is the user connection speed to
> deliver the best experience.
> 
> For instance, Totem has a YouTube plugin that allows the user to
> browse YouTube videos. YouTube website provides different resolutions.
> The choice of a larger or smallest resolution depends on user
> connection speed. At present time, Totem allow the user to set its
> connection speed to get the best resolution. It could be much smarter
> if the system could "guess" what is the current connection speed and
> automatically set the best resolution (see
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=521536#c13 )
> 
> Is there a way to know what is the current connection speed with nm ?

NM can tell you the connection speed of the local link, but that's
almost never what you want, because your local link is always going to
be faster than whatever pipes are between you and the provider.  So
basically, no.

You'd need other pieces of code that would test-download from the
content server to quickly determine the speed, and you'd also need to
dynamically adjust the speed during playback because the quick
speed-check at the start may well be either best-case or worst-case.

Dan