We have been testing a 50 Mbit business class fiber circuit. It’s very difficult to measure the performance since so many external factors influence the real throughput. The ISP does not have tools to allow us to measure circuit performance. There are many speed tests on the internet, but they each produce significantly different results. Another factor influencing speed is the distance between the test sites. Most circuits show a dramatic drop off in performance when measured to a point more than a few hundred miles away.

If you are looking to increase the throughput of your internet connection the raw bandwidth numbers of a circuit are going to be misleading. The best place to start is with a bandwidth analyzer / packet sniffer.

These programs monitor your network using a whole range of technologies and measure traffic and usage. They provide three key benefits:

• monitor bandwidth and server performance bottlenecks
• Deliver better quality of service by being proactive
• Reduce costs by buying bandwidth and hardware based on actual load

If you need to know what applications or IP-addresses are causing the traffic in your network you can use a Packet Sniffer which looks at every single data packet travelling in your network. It will break this down by protocol. You can see your mail, ftp, web, remote access and all other types of internet traffic.

Tags: bandwidth, fiber-optic

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 7th, 2008 at 3:41 am and is filed under Networking, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.