The Network icon in Windows 7 notification area doesn’t provide much information about the current network activity. While there are free utilities available to replace the default Windows 7 Network icon with Windows XP style icon, none of them come close to Network Activity Indicator.
Network Activity Indicator is a portable utility for Windows 7, developed by a deviantart user, to get advanced network activity information with a mouse click. When you run the application, a tiny network icon sits in the system tray area. Clicking on this network icon displays the current network activity with a cool graph.

You can also view the current download and upload speed by just hovering the mouse cursor over the network icon.

All-in-all, a great utility to replace the default network icon. An option to replace the default network icon would make this utility even better. Of course, you can always hide the default network icon from the system tray area by tweaking the settings in Control Panel.