check user connection's bandwidth in android mobile app at runtime

Question

i am working on an android application where i need to play find the connection's bandwidth at run time. i found out a solution on stack overflow itself saying that i can download a file from server and then by calculating size vs time , i can get the speed of connection.

Check the bandwidth rate in Android

Is this the best way (only way) to get accurate results ? Thanks for sharing knowledge.

Answer 1

You can't just query for this information. Your Internet speed is determined and controlled by your ISP, not by your network interface or router.

So the only way you can get your (current) connection speed is by downloading a file from a close enough location and timing how long it takes to retrieve the file. For example:

static final String FILE_URL = "http://www.example.com/speedtest/file.bin";
static final long FILE_SIZE = 5 * 1024 * 8; // 5MB in Kilobits

long mStart, mEnd;
Context mContext;
URL mUrl = new URL(FILE_URL);
HttpURLConnection mCon = (HttpURLConnection)mUrl.openConnection();
mCon.setChunkedStreamingMode(0);

if(mCon.getResponseCode() == HttpURLConnection.HTTP_OK) {
    mStart = new Date().getTime();

    InputStream input = mCon.getInputStream();
    File f = new File(mContext.getDir("temp", Context.MODE_PRIVATE), "file.bin");
    FileOutputStream fo = new FileOutputStream(f);
    int read_len = 0;

    while((read_len = input.read(buffer)) > 0) {
        fo.write(buffer, 0, read_len);
    }
    fo.close();
    mEnd = new Date().getTime();
    mCon.disconnect();

    return FILE_SIZE / ((mEnd - mStart) / 1000);
}

This code, when sightly modified (you need mContext to be a valid context) and executed from inside an AsyncTask or a worker thread, will download a remote file and return the speed in which the file was downloaded in Kbps.

Answer 2

Facebook released a library for this: You can try this

https://github.com/facebook/network-connection-class