The secret of the macOS Monterey network quality tool @danirukun

Network quality can mean different things, depending on the context. Talking about wireless link quality, often the focus is on Layer 1 properties like RSSI, noise, the Tx/Rx rate etc. Dan Petrov looks at transport layer metrics that can be collected with the new macOS networkQuality tool.

Apple has quietly added a new tool in macOS Monterey for measuring a device’s Internet connectivity quality. You can 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.

You can read more in Dan’s post here.