Monitor Net Traffic

[Mark Haney]

John Hubbard wrote:
> Here is my problem;  I want to know what kind of bandwidth my isp is 
> really giving me.  I have looked at a few different speed tests and I 
> get different results from them, and they often seem far faster than 
> what I actually get.  Now I realize that the bottle neck might be coming 
> from whoever is serving the content, but I am not sure. 
> So the question is; is there any way to generate any kind of report of 
> my bandwidth?  I only care about how fast I am able to get data when I 
> am trying to download it.  Often the connection is not being used at all 
> and I don't want to factor that in. 
> Any thoughts? 
> 

I deal with this a lot, working for a regional ISP.  The problem with 
most speed test sites is that they preload (some not all) the file they 
use to test (be it an image or whatever) to exaggerate the results. This 
has been a common problem I've seen over the last few years.

It's been our choice to have a ftp server sitting on our end of the 
network and have the customer ftp down various size empty files to test 
the bandwidth used.

While this might not work for you, it's relatively to calculate 
bandwidth usage with flood pings of known packet sizes.  You might want 
to try that with your other endpoint (or gateway), then the next hop up, 
etc.  That'll give you an idea of average bandwidth.


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Mark Haney
Sr. Systems Administrator
ERC Broadband
(828) 350-2415

Call (866) ERC-7110 for after hours support