BandwidthMonitor

BandwidthMonitor is a simple application you can use to monitor your network's bandwidth and find out the rate of sent and received packets. It features approachable options that can be tackled with ease even by those with minimal experience in networking utilities.

Installer, requirements, and interface

The setup procedure is fast and shouldn't give you any trouble, since there are no unfamiliar buttons or third-party offers involved. However, you must have .NET Framework installed, since it was developed with the aid of this platform.
Once fired up, the tool gets integrated into the system tray and sits there silently when not in use, monitoring the network bandwidth while enabling you to continue with your typical desktop without any interruptions.

Set the traffic speed and run tests

By opening the right-click menu, you can access the settings panel to change the download and upload speed (default is 10kb/s), in order to measure the download and upload statistics when it comes to rate along with bytes per second, minute and hour for BandwidthMonitor.
In addition, you can disable the fade in and out effects, as well as launch the developer's website to perform speed tests for fiber, cable, DSL, satellite, WISP or other connection types. Results show the download and upload date, together with the idle latency.

Evaluation and conclusion

The software application didn't put a strain on the machine's performance in our tests, since it needed a low amount of CPU and RAM to work properly. On the other hand, it popped up an error in several cases, forcing us to exit and restart the tool. We must also keep in mind that BandwidthMonitor hasn't received updates for a significant amount of time and likely has compatibility issues with newer Windows versions.
To sum it up, BandwidthMonitor facilitates a straightforward solution for monitoring the network bandwidth via the systray, in order to find out the download and upload rate.