Piece of cake ways to speedily test your bandwidth

Originally published on May 18, 2018 past
Last updated on March 30, 2022 • 7 minute read

To actually understand the health of your network, yous need ongoing monitoring. But sometimes y'all just demand a quick check to meet that everything is running like it should exist. A quick test of bandwidth can be very useful in this situation.

Much similar monitoring a credit score, when it comes to bandwidth, the specific number isn't as important every bit the general range. For example, if you normally get somewhere near xl Mbps for your cyberspace download speed, but information technology drops to 2 Mbps during sure times of day, there may be issues that need to be resolved. On the other paw, the departure between 41.23 Mbps and 40.89 Mbps is much less relevant.

i Bandwidth is measured every bit the amount of data that can be transferred from 1 point to some other inside a network in a specific amount of time. Typically, bandwidth is expressed as a bitrate and measured in bits per 2d (bps). It refers to the transmission capacity of a connectedness and is an important cistron when determining the quality and speed of a network.


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Internet speed examination tools

A quick and piece of cake way to get a bandwidth check is to use an internet-based speed exam. There is zilch to install and the results are available in seconds. There are numerous online bandwidth tests, including ones from big providers such as AT&T and Comcast in the U.S. And, just in example you are worried that your ISP might endeavor and brand their own service look faster than it is, there are independent speed tests, such as Speedtest.net or Google'due south Stadia bandwidth speed check.

These bandwidth tests work past downloading and uploading a known quantity of data to their server and then measuring the time information technology takes. The results (you become at least information nearly the upload speed, download speed, and ping) tin can tell you if the internet is actually tiresome today (for you at to the lowest degree) or if you're only in a hurry.

Local network bandwidth tests

The take hold of to an online, internet-based bandwidth test is that information technology involves the bandwidth of your cyberspace connection in the test. Sometimes, it is useful to know about the bandwidth on the local network. This requires a locally installed bandwidth tool or monitoring software.

For a simple bandwidth measurement on a single PC, Windows Task Managing director can show basic information about your Wi-Fi and ethernet connection. Only select the Performance tab and then click the network interface. In the example below, you tin see what happens when watching a YouTube trailer.local-network-bandwidth-test-2.jpg

To actually get a full picture of network bandwidth, it takes a more advanced tool similar Paessler PRTG monitoring software. This kind of tool has several advantages over simpler tools.
First, while it will as well let you look at a snapshot of current bandwidth data (LAN and/or Wi-Fi), information technology can also track and store bandwidth results. This allows an administrator to view how bandwidth changes over time. Also, the tools mentioned earlier only show how the bandwidth is available to the single computer running the examination.

With PRTG, and tools similar it, you tin can monitor all of the traffic on the local network as information technology passes by the network interface. This allows the administrator to not simply see how much bandwidth is bachelor, but too how much is being used and by whom (programme, device, service, protocol, IP accost etc.). Is there someone streaming loftier-definition videos? Is the printer repeatedly trying to download updates? In one case the administrator tin see what is using the bandwidth, they tin either set information technology, or make the case to upgrade to more bandwidth.

local-network-bandwidth-test-1.jpg PRTG also monitors additional performance data such equally latency, ping from different locations, or the availability of your internet connectedness in percent.

Other quick bandwidth tests

The data traffic on network interfaces tin can likewise be logged with the command line tool iftop. It runs on unix-like operating systems and tin exist constitute in the repositories of all common distributions and tin therefore ordinarily be installed via the package manager. You can employ it to explicitly determine where and how much bandwidth is being used on which network interface. It can display which network connections exist betwixt two IP addresses, as well every bit the number of data packets running over this connection. If necessary, it is possible to switch to the protocol level, where the entire CIFS or HTTP information stream can be displayed. This enables successful troubleshooting in case of a slow connexion.