A receiver and method for estimating an available bandwidth of a data channel streaming video data are provided. In one embodiment, the receiver includes: (1) a physical interface configured to receive the video data from a network, (2) a packet memory configured to store frames of the video data, (3) a dispersed packet time calculator configured to calculate a total time for one of the frames to go through the data channel, and (4) a bandwidth estimator configured to determine the available bandwidth of the data channel based on a number of data units received for the one frame and the total time.