What I am aware of though is that speed tests alone don't tell you very much. I am certainly no network guru but see words like 'capacity' and 'throughput' banded about in discussions.
AFAIUI 'Throughput' is just the amount of data you can down/upload in a given time and this is usually given in Mbps and that's exactly what is reported by the likes of magnet.speedtestcustom.com - but this only refers to data collected at that specific time, from that specific location. It makes me wonder if this is useful at all because most small networks with say 10-20 staff may be downloading and uploading data from/to different locations simultaneously and at different times of the day.
I suspect I would need to setup multiple up/downloads simultaneously and possibly of mixed traffic types [http + smtp + imap] and to sustain this for say 24 hours and then be able to make sense out of the collected data?
Hhmm, this is turning out to be harder than I first thought....
Yup - to get an accurate representation you need to run a continual assessment over a period of time. However, the first thought is that you clearly don't shunt 160Gb in one go - it's over a month. Also running it on your desktop probably isn't that representative either - can you stick some monitoring on your actual firewall or gateway ?
Some very rough maths.... assuming a 5 day week that means around 8Gb per day and an based on 8 hours per day that is a rough average of 1Gb per hour which is 17 megabytes a minute, which is about 136 megabits per minute, giving around 2.25 megabits per second (I think !!!!). If your line is say 80/55 megabits then on average it should be fine ??? You should calculate this a bit more accurately, and measure the actual data flow with something like vnstat to make sure you have the right numbers.
Your issue would be with burst speeds - someone wanting a 5Gb iso file NOW. That will be affected by contention ratio on the line - remember you share that 80Mb with a load of other people as well. At 3 am you'll get 80mb but you won't get it continuously in the middle of the day when loads of people are online. So do check the contention ratio on the package offered. Your ISP may also throttle or prioritise certain types of traffic - probably not easy to check that one, and they may not like to admit whether they do
A quick google revealed this page (I am sure there are many more) with some interesting tools:
https://www.serverdensity.com/monitor/linux/how-to/http://www.binarytides.com/linux-commands-monitor-network/The other one I was thinking where you can run a client and server and actually push/pull files/data is called netperf -
https://github.com/HewlettPackard/netperfYou could probably script/cron it so send regular amounts of data over a period and see what happens. However, remember that you will also be fighting with whatever other data is already flowing.... so it is hard to get a real test unless you can test the line with no other traffic.
HTH (I'm no networking guru!!!!)
B. Rgds
John
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