Bing

The Bing application was designed to be a point-to-point bandwidth measurement tool (hence the 'b'), based on ping.

Bing determines the real (raw, as opposed to available or average) throughput on a link by measuring ICMP echo requests roundtrip times for different packet sizes for each end of the link.

Suppose we are on host A and want to know the throughput between L1 and L2, two extremities of a point-to-point link.

A ----( the Internet )--- L1 --- L2

If we know the rtt (roundtrip time) between A and L1, and the rtt between A and L2, we can deduce the rtt between L1 and L2. If we do that for two different packet sizes, we can compute the raw capacity (bps) of the link.

Note that bing can also be used to have an idea of ethernet cards performance.