More of this Feature • Part 2: Toast.net Evaluation

Join the Discussion "Does anyone have suggestions for some free or cheap software tools/utilities for testing throughput and bandwidth from the desktop to the server in a LAN?" -MAESTROG

Related Resources • Introduction to Bandwidth and Latency • Bandwidth/Speed Tweaks

NONE	SEND	RECEIVE	SEND AND RECEIVE

The dynamic icon appears again on the DUN status page, shown below. This page reveals more session parameters, including connection state and duration, total bytes sent and received, errors, and compression ratios.

Marked in red for illustrative purposes, the Speed entry in the status window displays a data rate of 21.6 Kbps. This same statistic also appears in the DUN tooltips displayed at connect time (left) and throughout the life of the connection (right).

Windows receives this statistic from the modem at the time the modem protocol establishes the connection. The number represents the expected performance of the connection, not based on any data transfer history but rather on the design of the protocol in use.

Several factors can cause actual network performance to vary significantly from this theoretical value. As mentioned earlier, a high processor load on the computer on either end of the connection can create a bottleneck that lowers the data rate. On wide-area networks (WANs) such as the Internet, an overloaded router on the path from source to destination can also prevent connections from attaining optimal performance.

On the positive side, data compression can result in much higher speeds than reported on by Windows DUN. Compression works especially well with large amounts of text, such as HTML pages, though it handles images and other binary data much less effectively. Compressed data obviously cannot magically increase one's bandwidth, but it can utilize the same bandwidth more intelligently, resulting in higher user-perceived speed.

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