how to check for bandwidth limitations when uploading files?

probably not really a PHP question but i'll take a chance, anyway. i want to examine the network throughput i can get when continually uploading files from a PHP script via a POST request using the HTTP_Request2 class. i have a client-side script that simply takes files, creates a short POST request, and submits it to a server-side PHP script that takes the uploaded file and saves it. no big deal. as a test, i created a random 5M file, then looped 100 times submitting the same file, and timed it. while the system and user time was only a few seconds total, real (clock on the wall) time was 2.5 minutes. this suggests that the bottleneck is simply network transfer speed. while i'm doing these uploads, is there a way to monitor network throughput? if this is truly the bottleneck, the only real solution will be to pay a premium for faster network access, i suppose. but i'd just like to be able to produce some numbers or evidence that that's the actual problem. thoughts? rday