Measuring network throughput

Network throughput is like measuring how fast your toy cars can race on a track. Imagine you have a big toy car track in your room and you want to find out how fast your toy cars can go. First, you need to set up the cars on the track and start a stopwatch. Then, you watch the cars go around the track and count how many laps they can complete in one minute.

In the same way, when we measure network throughput, we are seeing how much data can be sent from one device to another through a network in a certain amount of time. We send data in the form of files, videos, music, pictures, and web pages over the internet, and we want to know how fast this data can be sent.

To measure network throughput, we choose two points on the network to measure from, such as a computer or device and a server. Then, we calculate how much data can be transferred between them in a given unit of time, usually measured in bits per second (bps), kilobits per second (kbps), megabits per second (Mbps), or gigabits per second (Gbps).

So just like counting how many laps toy cars can go around a track in a minute, we measure how much data can travel through a network per second.