[wplug] Measuring & optimizing broadband speed

[Zach]

I am looking for accurate methods of measuring broadband speed,
particularly for a 728 kbps / 128 kbps DSL line.
I want to see how close my real world throughput gets to the
advertised bandwidth. Also what is the theoretical maximum and minimum
ping (average return time) and lag (standard deviation of the ping)
for such a DSL line? Is there any sort of MTU, routing table or TCP/IP
stack changes I can make (if so please explain how) to increase my
latency, lag and packet loss? I use Debian lenny with a 2.6.18 kernel.
Oh yes I will have a static IP address.

Also I got some advice on how to setup my ADSL line I'm getting next
week but no one mentioned using the "route" command and setting up the
routing table (gateway, metrics, netmask). Is that not necessary in my
case?

Zach