The secret of the macOS Monterey network quality tool
Dan Petrov found a cool new utility:
It seems that Apple has quietly added a new tool in macOS Monterey for measuring your device’s Internet connectivity quality. You can simply call the executablenetworkQuality
, which executes the following tests:
- Upload/download capacity (your Tx/Rx bandwidth essentially)
- Upload/download flows, this seems to be the number of test packets used for the responsiveness tests
- Upload/download responsiveness measured in Roundtrips Per Minute (RPM), which according to Apple, is the number of sequential round-trips, or transactions, a network can do in one minute under normal working conditions
The capacity is roughly the same metric you could expect from tools like Fast.com from Netflix, or OOkla’s Speedtest.
Go to your terminal on your MacBook running macOS Monterey and type in networkQuality
and hit enter and viola:
==== SUMMARY ====
Upload capacity: 1.136 Mbps
Download capacity: 204.729 Mbps
Upload flows: 16
Download flows: 12
Responsiveness: Medium (544 RPM)