Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Monterey Network Quality Tool

Dan Petrov (via Hacker News):

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

The capacity is roughly the same metric you could expect from tools like Fast.com from Netflix, or OOkla’s Speedtest.

Previously:

Update (2021-11-24): Jason Snell:

I’ve written a small SwiftBar plugin (requires python3) to run networkQuality and report the results in the menu bar every 20 minutes. You can download it here if you’re interested.

Update (2023-05-15): CyberHost (via Hacker News):

The Network Quality tool also supports Apple’s Private Relay feature, which encrypts and routes all network traffic through two separate servers for added privacy and security.

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