System information

Manual:Troubleshooting tools

Detailed commands description can be found in the manual >>

Bandwidth test

The Bandwidth Tester can be used to measure the throughput (Mbps) to another MikroTik router (either wired or

wireless network) and thereby help to discover network "bottlenecks"- network point with lowest throughput.

BW test uses two protocols to test bandwidth:

• TCP – uses the standard TCP protocol operation principles with all main components like connection

initialization, packets acknowledgments, congestion window mechanism and all other features of TCP algorithm.

Please review the TCP protocol for details on its internal speed settings and how to analyze its behavior. Statistics

for throughput are calculated using the entire size of the TCP data stream. As acknowledgments are an internal

working of TCP, their size and usage of the link are not included in the throughput statistics. Therefore statistics

are not as reliable as the UDP statistics when estimating throughput.

• UDP traffic – sends 110% or more packets than currently reported as received on the other side of the link. To see

the maximum throughput of a link, the packet size should be set for the maximum MTU allowed by the links

which is usually 1500 bytes. There is no acknowledgment required by UDP; this implementation means that the

closest approximation of the throughput can be seen.

Remember that Bandwidth Test uses all available bandwidth (by default) and may impact network usability.

If you want to test real throughput of a router, you should run bandwidth test through the router not from or to it. To

do this you need at least 3 routers connected in chain:

Bandwidth Server – router under test – Bandwidth Client.