Question : How to measure leased line speed using ping output

To All Geeks out there!

I have got a 64K leased line and I would want to verify that the line is really giving me 64K but I don't have money to buy equipment or software to use for measuring the line speed.

I want to use the output from a simple ping to compute or calculate the speed of the line.

How do I get about doing it?

Please remember that I am not a network guru and would appreciate full interpretation of the ping output.

My output from a DEC Unix box looks more or less like:

PING 172.20.3.1 (172.20.3.1): 56 data bytes
64 bytes from 172.20.3.1: icmp_seq=0 ttl=62 time=38 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.3.1: icmp_seq=1 ttl=62 time=18 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.3.1: icmp_seq=2 ttl=62 time=18 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.3.1: icmp_seq=3 ttl=62 time=19 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.3.1: icmp_seq=4 ttl=62 time=18 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.3.1: icmp_seq=5 ttl=62 time=18 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.3.1: icmp_seq=6 ttl=62 time=19 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.3.1: icmp_seq=7 ttl=62 time=21 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.3.1: icmp_seq=8 ttl=62 time=19 ms
64 bytes from 172.20.3.1: icmp_seq=9 ttl=62 time=20 ms
                                                       

Answer : How to measure leased line speed using ping output

Well a ping is only a relative measuring tool.  In other words, you can use it to comparitively test agaist other ping output you've done in the past, but it gives you no hard answers as to the amount of bandwidth, congestion, delay, etc that may have been used or experienced along the way.  Typically, you can use output from the routers to see how much traffic is actually moving accross the interfaces.  If you have access to the routers and know how to get interface statistics from it, you could send a large quantity of data across the line and look at the stats to see if it is around 80% of the total speed (serial lines are saturated at around 80%).

One thing I'm curious about - why would you question the throughput of a leased line?  Leased line service is the most trustworthy service you can get and all of the bandwidth is specifically dedicated to your use.  Usually, people want to do the testing I was mentioning above on services such as Frame Relay.

Hope that is of some help!