We all have heard the perennial complaint, “the network is sooo slow.” A primary reason is the inelegantly-named bufferbloat – caused by a bad router that queues up too much data (“the router gets bloated because it buffers too many packets”).

The good news is that a fix has been known for quite a while now, and it’s often a matter of properly configuring the router.

Dave Täht likes to go into coffee shops and help the owners provide better network service for the customers. (Sometimes, he gets a free meal!) He developed a small script for measuring the bufferbloat to use for before and after tests.

I’ve tweaked the script to make it easier to run and display the results. (You still need to install Flent and fping to make it work on your laptop.) But now you can go to your favorite coffee shop to measure the state of the network. See the script at https://github.com/richb-hanover/coffee-shop-bloat-test