When you share your internet connection with several people, it can happen that things slow down: there are limits to the bandwidth that you have available. With the right tools, you can monitor the bandwidth of your home network and also measure the actual throughput speed.
Tip 01: Quality of Service
Most modern routers have a minimal QoS function. That stands for Quality of Service and means that you can prioritize specific traffic. With the right QoS rules, for example, you can avoid video streams stuttering because a heavy download is currently underway: you then give the video stream priority over the download. To find out which QoS capabilities your router has, it is best to look in the manual. QoS functionality may require a firmware upgrade first.
Tip 02: Speed ​​test
Before you get started with QoS, you first have to think carefully about what exactly you hope to achieve. Focus on the major bandwidth issues so that the number of QoS rules remains limited. Also important to map out in advance is your actual connection speed. You can simply test that (and possibly a few times) on www.speedtest.net/nl. The gopressing the button is enough. This way you already have a better idea of ​​how much bandwidth can be distributed.
Tip 03: Set QoS
Exactly how you control the QoS function depends on your router. For example, on a Linksys Smart Wi-Fi EA6400 router, you should enter the section Media Priority are, where you Priority Settings turns on. Then you can simply drag one or more network devices, applications or online games from a list to the section High priority. Bee Institutions do you also fill in a correct Downstream bandwidth in. These options may be slightly different on your own router.
Windows
Windows also offers some features that let you track how much bandwidth programs and processes are using at any given time. One of them is the Task Manager. Right click on the Windows start button and choose task management. If necessary, click More details. Click on the column title Network to sort the items according to the current network usage. A more detailed tool is Windows Resource Monitor. To do this, press Windows key+R, tick response in (resource monitor) and confirm with Enter. Here you open the tab Network. Click on the column title Total (bytes/sec.) to see consumption in descending or ascending order. You can also do this for both the outgoing (Send) if the incoming (Receive) traffic. Do you see something in there that you don’t know exactly what it is or that you seem suspicious? Right click on that item and choose Search online: a search engine will work with the process name and hopefully give you a definitive answer about its intentions.
Tip 04: NetTraffic
We’ll show you how to generate both a current and historical overview of bandwidth usage on a Windows PC. We do this with the free tool Venea NetTraffic. You download that here. You will find both an installable and a portable version here. By default, near the Windows system tray you will see a pop-up window with the amount of bandwidth used in real time, both download traffic (green), upload traffic (red) and total (yellow). With a double click you maximize and minimize this window.
Tip 05: View information
Right click on the program icon in the Windows system tray and select Settings. Open the tab Graph to fully customize the graph window. You decide which information you want to see in the graph, in which colors and with which visualization. On the tab General, Bee data source you can also check which network adapter(s) NetTraffic should map the traffic for.
Tip 06: Statistics
NetTraffic not only shows you the network usage of the moment, you can also request historical statistics. Right click on the program icon and choose Statistics. On the tab Charts / Tables can you now include a Date range and a Unit of time Set up. Through the tab Table This information is also presented in tabular form. On the tab quota you can see which quotas (which can be set via Institutions / tab quota) may have been exceeded.
On the tab General you will see a numerical and current overview per year, month, day and hour. From the menu Dates you can export information in XML format. The option is also interesting Utilities in the context menu of the program icon. Here you can use commands such as ping, nslookup, tracert, ipconfig /all or arp -a -v to carry out.
Tip 07: Throughput Speed
The throughput of a network is not the same as bandwidth. The latter term refers to the total capacity available to a system to transmit data over a channel or medium. It is therefore a theoretical, maximum achievable speed. However, in a network, there is a lot of overhead due to, among other things, network protocol controls or misconfigured hardware, which can lead to reduced throughput. The throughput can therefore be defined as the amount of data between two points in a given period of time. We usually express this speed in kilobits per second (kbit/s).
Delay
When measuring throughput, you also have to take latency into account (delay). That is the time between sending the first request for data and actually starting to receive data. That delay depends on several factors, including the medium itself. For example, an average cable or DSL connection often has a latency of a few tens of milliseconds. But there are other factors, such as antivirus software, proxy servers, poorly configured hardware, intermediate routers and so on. With the command line command ping can you uncover such latencies and with tracert you can detect potential bottlenecks. Or you use the command pathping
Tip 08: Download TamoSoft
TamoSoft is an easy-to-use package for measuring throughput. You download the free tool here. It is available for Windows, macOS and mobile devices. The latter means that you can also measure the transfer speeds within your wireless network. We are looking at the Windows variant here. After extracting the downloaded zip file you will find two executable files in C:Program Files (x86)TamoSoft Throughput Test: TTClient.exe and TTServer.exe. You start the client module on the PC from which you want to measure the transfer speed to another computer. You then start the server module on the latter. Let’s start on the client side. Here you enter the IP address of the server. The port number on both sides is default 27100. Unless you’re having trouble, you can leave that alone. You make sure that the ports on both ‘endpoints’ are identical and that any firewalls do not block the traffic. If necessary, you indicate to your firewall that it concerns bona fide network traffic.
Tip 09: How TamoSoft works
If both systems are nicely matched, press the Connectbutton on client side. If all goes well, a graph is immediately drawn that records the throughput rates in real time. By default, traffic is measured in both directions, for both TCP and UDP. Place a checkmark TCP only if you are only interested in this protocol. On the client side, you can also use a so-called QoS traffic type simulate. The option Best Effort shows normal times (without QoS) and AudioVideo simulates QoS values ​​optimized for video streaming.
Tip 10: iPerf as a server
Advanced users will also like to use the portable tool iPerf, which you can download here. iPerf can be operated from the command line and is multi-platform, also for mobile environments. Like the TamoSoft tool, iPerf also works according to the server-client model. Let’s start with the server side. Here you run a command like:
iperf3 -s
If you want to save everything that this machine receives from the client in a text file, then that would be for example:
iperf3 -s > iperf3logs.txt
Also make sure that your firewall is not blocking the connection. If you still prefer a port other than the default port 5201, then add the parameter –p
Tip 11: iPerf as client
On the client side, a command like:
iperf3 -c
You can also log the information here in a text file. By default, such a test takes ten seconds, but this can be adjusted, for example with the parameter –t 30, for a half-minute test. Other parameters are also possible, such as –R (to reverse direction), –P
Also with Wireshark
Wireshark (free download from www.wireshark.org) is a very powerful packet sniffer and protocol analyzer, which also allows you to measure throughput rates. Start a capture session. The fastest way to measure throughput is through the menu Statistics where you Capture File Properties chooses. You will find the necessary information at the bottom, in the section Statistics. You can also measure the throughput of a specific protocol. Let’s take TCP as an example. Right click on a suitable package and choose Conversation filter / TCP. Then you open the menu Statistics and select your Protocol Hierarchy.
