Victor Wynne

The network quality command in Monterey

source: danpetrov.xyz

Dan Petrov:

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 executable networkQuality, 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

I’m not sure why this new inclusion didn’t bubble to the surface during the summer. I just tested it in beta 1 of Monterey and it was already there at the beginning of the beta period. So glad to see this added because I will be using it constantly in scripts I run on remote macOS servers that I operate. Now if only there was a variant for testing local network speeds. 🧐