WAN-na Test Your Network? Just Copy Some Files, Dude!

When it comes to testing your WAN links, people often overcomplicate things. They bust out fancy monitoring tools, graphs that look like stock charts, and dashboards with more colors than a bag of Skittles. But here’s the deal: sometimes the best way to know if your WAN link is healthy is to just… copy a file. Yup. Old school, drag-and-drop style. Think of it like kicking the tires on a car—except the tires are digital, and the car is your bandwidth.

Copying files across your WAN is like asking your network, “Bro, can you handle this?” And the network either flexes and moves that file like a champ, or it wheezes like a smoker running a marathon. You’ll see the truth instantly—no need for a PhD in network analytics. If that file transfer crawls slower than a sloth on NyQuil, you’ve got a problem. And if it zooms across like your buddy’s new fiber line, congratulations, your WAN is feeling strong today.

Here’s the beauty of the file-copy test: it’s real-world, relatable, and brutally honest. No synthetic numbers, no simulated packets—just raw, everyday file transfer action across real equipment, using real servers and clients. It’s the same activity your users are probably doing anyway (and then complaining about when it doesn’t work). By mimicking real behavior, you’re testing not just the WAN, but also whether your users are about to storm your desk with pitchforks and support tickets.

And let’s be honest, it’s kind of satisfying. Watching that progress bar race to 100% feels like victory. Watching it stall at 2% feels like despair. Either way, you’ll know whether your WAN is ready for battle or in desperate need of reinforcements. So before you go spending thousands on some “enterprise link validation software,” try writing and reading a chunky file as well as a bunch of small files and see what happens. It’s cheap, easy, and occasionally hilarious. WAN testing doesn’t have to be rocket science—it just has to work. 

I've written a few posts already how to calculate the theoretical time it takes to transmit data, but you can never account for processing latency, so develop your own baselines.

When you get the hang of it you can always write a batch file schedule it and save your results.