Need to monitor before and after network performance, any good suggestions?

Hi Guys,

Background info:

This is a peculiar one just wondered if you had any suggestions.  I am a desktop consultant within my organisation.  The network and implementation team wish to double the bandwidth to one of our satellite offices in Paris from 10mb to 20mb due to their expansion.  Its been sold to them on the basis that they will see an improvement.  All their file/mail/VOIP servers are based in the UK.  The bandwidth on the line goes up and down all day at random intervals often maxing out.  

The Question:

I have been asked to try and establish some means of measuring real world performance prior to the upgrade so we can dispute the fact that the situation has improved, in the event the Paris users are still unhappy, this is a sort of pre-emptive.  Ideally I suppose some sort of tool that could monitor the time it takes to open a word file/Excel file which is based in the UK might be a good solution?  I don’t know if such a tool exists?  I am only one man so I don’t really have to much time and resource to dedicate so a machine agent that I could leave on the machine for a week would be great?

Anyone have any better suggestions/ Plan of action?

Thanks in advance guys…