Run a Speed Test From Terminal With networkquality

Since macOS 12 Monterey, every Mac has shipped with a real speed test built into Terminal. networkquality measures download and upload capacity like any speed-test site — and adds a responsiveness score most of them don't have. Here's how to run it and read the results on macOS 13, 14, and 15.

Run the test

# The full test — takes about 20 seconds
networkquality

No flags needed, no ads, no browser. The test runs against Apple's servers and prints a short summary when it finishes:

• Uplink capacity — your upload speed, in Mbps.
• Downlink capacity — your download speed, in Mbps.
• Responsiveness — rated Low, Medium, or High, with a number in RPM.

The capacity numbers are the ones you'd compare against what your ISP sells you. The responsiveness score is the one that explains why a "fast" connection can still feel terrible.

Treat any single run as a snapshot, not a verdict. Speeds move with the time of day — an evening result can be sharply lower than a mid-morning one on the same line, which points at congestion rather than a fault. Run the test a few times across a day before drawing conclusions, and close bandwidth-hungry apps first unless you specifically want to measure the connection under your normal load.

What the RPM score actually means

RPM stands for round-trips per minute: how many back-and-forth exchanges your connection can complete while it's already busy. That's the key difference from a plain latency number — it's measured under load, when someone in the house is uploading video or your Mac is syncing to iCloud.

This is bufferbloat in human terms. A connection can score hundreds of Mbps and still make video calls stutter and web pages hang, because the router queues up so much bulk traffic that small, urgent packets wait in line behind it. Low RPM (roughly under 100) means exactly that experience; High (roughly 1,000 or more) means the connection stays snappy even when it's saturated. If your calls degrade whenever a backup runs, this number — not your download speed — is the culprit.

Can you improve a low score? Sometimes. Test again over Ethernet to take Wi-Fi out of the equation — if RPM jumps, the bottleneck is your wireless link, not your ISP. If it stays low on a cable, look at the router: models with Smart Queue Management (sometimes labelled SQM or QoS) are designed to keep exactly this number healthy. And expect some run-to-run variation — the Low/Medium/High bucket is more meaningful than the precise figure.

Flags worth knowing

# Test download and upload one at a time, like classic speed-test sites
networkquality -s

# Verbose output: more detail, including latency measurements
networkquality -v

# Test a specific interface (e.g. Ethernet instead of Wi-Fi)
networkquality -I en0

By default the test loads upload and download at the same time — deliberately, because that's what real usage looks like. -s switches to sequential mode, which usually produces slightly higher numbers and matches how sites like speedtest.net measure. So if your result looks lower than the browser tests you're used to, run it with -s before assuming something is wrong; you're probably just seeing the stricter methodology.

-v adds detail such as idle and working latency, useful when you're chasing a specific problem rather than a headline number. For -I, the interface name matters: en0 is usually Wi-Fi on a MacBook, and a USB-C or Thunderbolt Ethernet adapter appears as a higher-numbered interface — run networksetup -listallhardwareports to see which name belongs to which port before you test.

If the numbers disappoint

Run the test twice — once next to the router, once where you normally work. A big gap between the two means the problem is Wi-Fi coverage, not your ISP. Start with checking your Wi-Fi signal strength before you pick up the phone to complain about your plan.