Test your internet speed on a Mac with networkQuality

Every Mac has a built-in internet speed test, and it’s easy to miss because it has no app or icon. It runs in Terminal with one command, needs nothing installed, and gives you real numbers before you call your provider about slow internet.

What networkQuality is

networkQuality is a speed test that Apple builds into macOS Monterey (macOS 12) and later, and you run it from Terminal instead of a website or an app.

Apple calls it the Apple Network Responsiveness test. Besides your upload and download speeds, it measures something a plain speed number doesn’t show: how quickly the connection still answers while it’s busy, which is what decides whether a video call stutters while someone else is uploading. It runs against Apple’s servers and uses data on your plan, so mind it on a phone hotspot.

How to run networkQuality in Terminal

To run it, open Terminal, type networkQuality and press Return.

1. Open Terminal. Press Command-Space to open Spotlight, type Terminal and press Return. Or, in the Finder, open Applications > Utilities and double-click Terminal.
2. Pause anything big on the network, like a cloud backup or a 4K stream, so it doesn’t eat into the result.
3. Type the command and press Return:

networkQuality

After a short test you get a summary like this one, from a real run over Wi-Fi on a Mac with macOS 27:

==== SUMMARY ====
Uplink capacity: 56.618 Mbps
Downlink capacity: 464.516 Mbps
Responsiveness: Medium (127.285 milliseconds | 471 RPM)
Idle Latency: 28.706 milliseconds | 2090 RPM

Don’t worry about the capital Q. On our Mac, networkquality in lowercase ran the same tool.

What the results mean

The first two lines are your speeds, and the last two tell you how much delay the connection adds, first under load and then when it is quiet.

Uplink and downlink capacity are your maximum upload and download speeds in megabits per second (Mbps). Browsers show downloads in megabytes per second, so divide by 8 to compare: 464 Mbps is about 58 MB/s. The download time calculator does the conversion and shows how long a file takes.

Responsiveness and Idle Latency are both round-trip times, shown in milliseconds and in round trips per minute (RPM). RPM is the same number turned around so that higher is better: 60,000 divided by the round-trip time in milliseconds, so 127 ms works out to 471 RPM. Idle Latency is measured while the line is quiet, Responsiveness while the test has it fully loaded.

The gap between those two is the part worth looking at. This connection answers in under 30 ms when it’s quiet, but once the test fills the line, each round trip takes over four times as long. The IETF draft behind the test calls this bufferbloat: data piles up in a queue somewhere, often in the router or modem, and everything else waits behind it. That’s what makes a video call stutter while someone else in the house uploads photos.

What counts as good responsiveness

Apple labels responsiveness Low, Medium or High, and it describes each one by what you’ll notice.

At Low, apps like FaceTime video or games might be unreliable while another device downloads a movie or backs up photos to iCloud. At Medium, you might see momentary pauses or freezes, for example on FaceTime calls, when several devices or apps share the network. At High, apps should stay well connected however many devices share the network.

Apple doesn’t publish the RPM cutoffs for those labels, but the IETF draft behind the test gives a rough scale: under 300 RPM is poor, 300 to 1,000 fair, 1,000 to 6,000 good, and 6,000 or more excellent. Our 471 RPM is Medium for Apple and fair on the draft’s scale, so on this connection a FaceTime call can freeze for a moment when the rest of the house is busy.

Compare Wi-Fi and Ethernet

Run the test once on Wi-Fi and once on Ethernet, and the difference tells you whether your Wi-Fi or your internet line is the bottleneck.

The -I option ties the test to one network interface. To see the names, run:

networksetup -listallhardwareports

Look for the Device line under Wi-Fi (on our Mac it was en0) and under your Ethernet port or adapter. Then test each one, swapping in your own names:

networkQuality -I en0
networkQuality -I en5

If Ethernet is much better, the Wi-Fi is the weak link, and that often comes down to where the router sits: read where to put your router, move it, and test again. If Ethernet is just as poor, the delay builds up in the router, the modem or your provider’s line. Apple’s answer there is a router with Smart Queue Management (SQM), which keeps responsiveness high, though these are high-end routers that usually need expert setup.

Useful networkQuality options

You can add options after the command, and networkQuality -h lists all of them. These are the ones you’re most likely to want:

• -s tests upload and download one after the other instead of at the same time, the fairer way to compare with a speed test website.
• -v shows more detail about the run.
• -c prints the results as JSON, handy if you want to log runs over time, for example networkQuality -c > result.json.
• -p runs the test through iCloud Private Relay, if you have iCloud+.

You can combine them, as in networkQuality -s -v. For full details, type man networkQuality (press Q to leave).

Why the result differs from speed test websites

networkQuality and a speed test website rarely agree, because they test against different servers and load the line in different ways.

networkQuality talks to Apple’s servers and a website uses its own, so your data takes a different route. networkQuality also uploads and downloads at the same time by default, and a busy upload can drag the download down, which is why -s gives a closer match. And the ping a speed test shows up front is measured on an idle line, so compare it with Idle Latency. Responsiveness is the delay with the line full, closer to what a video call feels like when the whole household is online.

Neither number is wrong. To see whether a change helped, like a new router spot or a new plan, compare runs of the same tool on the same Mac.