calc.engineer / Homelab & Networking / Network Bandwidth

Network Bandwidth v1.0.0

Plan and validate network link capacity for homelab workloads. Determine whether a 1G, 2.5G, 10G, or faster link can handle your concurrent streams (VMs, backups, media, iSCSI). Calculates effective bandwidth after TCP/IP overhead, total required bandwidth, utilization percentage, and remaining headroom. Flags saturation at 80% utilization and identifies whether the bottleneck is network or storage. Provides a 1TB transfer time reference and recommends the next link speed upgrade if your current link is saturated. Useful for planning NIC upgrades, switch purchases, and storage network design.

Network link speed in gigabits per second (e.g. 1, 2.5, 5, 10, 25, 40, 100)
Number of concurrent data streams / transfers
Bandwidth required per stream in megabits per second
TCP/IP protocol overhead as a percentage (typically 3-5% for TCP, ~1% for UDP)
Maximum storage read/write throughput in megabits per second. If provided, checks whether storage is the bottleneck
Fill in the inputs and Compute to see the structured result.

From an agent (MCP) or the API

curl -X POST https://calc.engineer/api/network_bandwidth \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"link_speed_gbps": …, "concurrent_streams": …, "stream_bandwidth_mbps": …}'

MCP: connect to https://calc.engineer/mcp and call network_bandwidth.

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