[nonhuman]

Does anyone know a way that I can figure out what sort of bandwidth I'm getting on average during business hours? Using the speed meter at 2wire's site I'm pretty sure our office is on a shared dual-T1 (it usually says I get between 2.5 and 2.8 Mb/s), but I know just from browsing that my actual throughput is much lower.

Is there a good way that I can test this?

[ghporter]

Sometimes there's a difference between available bandwidth and throughput. If your ISP's connection to the Internet is very busy, you could basically have plenty of bandwidth but not much traffic due to congestion. Have you talked with your provider about this?

I usually recommend a few tools like these at BroadbandReports.com or SBC's Speed Tests to determine current bandwidth, but I don't know of a tool that checks repeatedly and gives you bandwidth over time.

[nonhuman]

I know there's a difference between available bandwidth and throughput. That's why i want to find out what sort of speeds I'm actually getting on average.

This is for my office which is currently in managed offices and getting internet through the building management (which is so technically incompetent there's been several occasions when they've given me the key to the wiring closet so that the problems can actually get fixed in a reasonable amount of time). We're about to move to our own offices, so I'm trying to figure out what sort of connection we need.

I'll check out those two links, thanks.

[ghporter]

Apparently you need to know your average throughput then...and as I said, I don't have a tool for that.

My guess is that you need at least 50% more bandwidth than you've been getting-if you do a bandwidth test (or better yet two or three) at the same time(s) every day, you should get a rough average of what you have access to.

One note: I'd look into a commercial DSL connection over a T1. I've been using a 3Mbps down/384kbps up SBC DSL connection from home for quite a while, and we can have three or four computers online at the same time -doing some pretty bandwidth-intensive stuff- and not had real problems with it. You can get 6Mbps down connections for not too much (especially when compared to leased T1s) and usually get a pretty good upload speed with the package too. And the fact that there's very little management to do with a DSL connection makes it really attractive, too.