How to Check Internet Speed via Terminal on macOS Monterey

By . in Desktop. Updated on .

Good news for Mac users is you can now check your internet speed via command line. It’s literally just one command, which I’m going to tell you now: networkQuality. That’s it. It’s that simple.

And it will show you your upload and download speed, upload and download flows, and your internet connection’s responsiveness. But if you want to learn some more new tricks, then read on.

And of course, you’ll need to upgrade to the latest macOS Monterey. Before doing so, make sure your Mac is at least 2015 or later, and check the system requirements too.

Running the Command

Running the command is pretty simple. All you have to do is to take the following steps:

  1. Firstly open Terminal. You can do this by searching for it in your dashboard or just press Command + Space and search for “Terminal” in your spotlight (Spotlight is the search function that shows up when you press Command + Space)
  2. Once there, type networkQuality and press Return.
  3. It will run for a few seconds and it will show you the results, as shown below:
How to test internet speed using command line terminal in macOS Monterey

Here are some terminologies that might help you understand things better:

RPM

RPM means Round-trips Per Minute – it is how many packets or transactions your connection is able to do per minute. The higher it is, the better of course.

  • High means your network is breathing just fine, no matter how many devices are connected to it or how many apps are running, it is not congested.
  • Medium means there might be some stutters if you’re streaming a movie, on FaceTime with someone, or your downloads might spike up or crash.
  • Low means the network is congested, probably because of several apps using it at the same time, and your bandwidth is very limited.
Flows

Flows means the number of test packets sent to test the download and upload capacity. It’s just like information being sent roundtrip to see the capacity of your connection

Upload/Download

Upload and Download capacity is basically just what you’d see on test sites like Speedtest by Ookla.

By default, using the networkQuality command tests your connection against the default server. But if you want to test it against your own server, you can do so like this:

networkQuality -C https://mynetwork.com:8443/config

By default, networkQuality runs the test against Apple’s CDN – https://mensura.cdn-apple.com/api/v1/gm/config

It’s also important to note that when you run this command, it will run the tests in parallel. But if you want to run things sequentially, you can run it this way:

networkQuality -s

And if you need more help or information about the commands, run it as:

man networkQuality

If you are interested to see the support and development this feature receives, check out Network Quality’s GitHub page. If you are a developer, you can also hop in and fork the code, run some tests on your own and then share with the world.

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