On a Unix machine, you can use this little ftp trick to have an idea of your throughput :

ftp somehost
ftp> put “| dd if=/dev/zero bs=100000 count=100″ /dev/null
200 PORT command successful.
150 ASCII data connection for /dev/null (192.168.0.1,32953).
100+0 records in
100+0 records out
226 Transfer complete.
local: | dd if=/dev/zero bs=100000 count=100 remote: /dev/null
10000000 bytes sent in 2.9 seconds (3388.52 Kbytes/s)

This will generate a stream of bytes from one host to another and give you the data rate at the end