LAN Speed Test

Usually, the speed advertised by your ISP is one thing, and the true speed of your network in the real world is a completely different one.

LAN Speed Test offers you a free and accurate solution to help you find out the real reading/writing speed of your connection. This completely portable and tiny tool will let you the speed of your data transfers at a given time and during a certain period of time.

Though simple enough to be used for all kinds of users, interpreting the results provided by the tests performed by this thorough utility requires certain knowledge not only about how networks work but also about data and transfer speed measurements. If you happen to be savvy enough to understand and use these data, you will love LAN Speed Test.

Do not mistake your Internet connection speed with your data transfers speed, though. To test and measure the former you can make use of a wide variety of free and online testing tools, but if you need to know how fast your data travel from one computer to the next inside your own LAN, LAN Speed Test is the tool to use. It will give you accurate measurements of the writing (uploading) and read (downloading) speeds by packet size. It’ll tell you the time it took to each packet and to all the data transferred the bytes per second, and the bits per second. You can view the average, maximum, and minimum throughputs, and display this results as a chart or as a detailed list of useful data. You can send these data to your clipboard for later reference, but you won’t be allowed to save it to file directly.

You can tell the program to perform a standard test – which will save the data used in the hard drive of your choice – or use its LST Server, which will write the test file to the server’s memory, thus giving you a more accurate picture of your network’s true speed and performance. LST Server can be used as a standalone tool if so desired. LAN Speed Test comes in two flavors – Lite (the free version reviewed here) and a paid version that allows for more thorough tests and that provide a wider variety of data. Being free and portable, the Lite version is an excellent place to start, if you really want to know how your network is truly performing.