Is Terminal command more accurate or is Ookla?

[Speed38]

I ran the terminal command networkquality on my 2020 iMac, SSD, macOS 13.6 connected to my Synology router via ethernet.

It returned this:

Uplink capacity: 21.916 Mbps
Downlink capacity: 77.450 Mbps
Responsiveness: Low (526.316 milliseconds | 114 RPM)
Idle Latency: 16.250 milliseconds | 3750 RPM

I then immediately ran the Ookla speed test, insuring that a nearby server was chosen and it returned:
Download: 82.41 Mbps
Updload: 90.8 Mbps
Ping: 10 ms

Anyone know which to believe and why?

 

[Bigwaff]

What command flags and arguments did you use when running networkQuality?

 

[Speed38]

Oh, oh! I am embarrassed to admit that you lost me at "command flags" and "arguments". I simply launched Terminal and pasted in that networkquality command.

 

[Bigwaff]

I am embarrassed to admit that you lost me at "command flags" and "arguments". I simply launched Terminal and pasted in that networkquality command.

Ok. Thought you might have run it against a specific host.

One of the flags is "-s" which will run the downlink/uplink tests sequentially, which is how Speedtest by Ookla does it. For me, with the "-s" flag, both `networkQuality` and `speedtest` report pretty much the same results.

❯ networkQuality -sv ==== SUMMARY ==== Uplink capacity: 88.361 Mbps (Accuracy: Medium) Downlink capacity: 646.911 Mbps (Accuracy: Medium) Uplink Responsiveness: Medium (545 RPM) (Accuracy: Medium) Downlink Responsiveness: Medium (273 RPM) (Accuracy: Medium) Idle Latency: 64.125 milliseconds (Accuracy: High) Interface: en0 Uplink bytes transferred: 122.951 MB Downlink bytes transferred: 973.106 MB Uplink Flow count: 20 Downlink Flow count: 20 Start: 11/6/23, 9:45:49 PM End: 11/6/23, 9:46:19 PM OS Version: Version 13.6 (Build 22G120) ❯ speedtest Speedtest by Ookla Server: **************** ISP: **************** Idle Latency: 65.92 ms (jitter: 21.27ms, low: 43.41ms, high: 80.89ms) Download: 663.65 Mbps (data used: 1.1 GB) 207.71 ms (jitter: 59.84ms, low: 53.03ms, high: 733.44ms) Upload: 82.98 Mbps (data used: 93.7 MB) 412.68 ms (jitter: 81.11ms, low: 47.45ms, high: 942.31ms) Packet Loss: 0.0%

 

[Speed38]

Thanks for taking the time to respond; I thought I had probably lost you when I 'fessed up to not understanding the terminology you were using. Good of you to hang in there.

I ran your networkQuality -sv command in Terminal and then ran Ookla and the results were reasonably close:
Terminal:
Up 84.150
Down 75.232
Latency 16 ms

Ookla
Up 82.87
Down 91.44
Latency 11 ms

Thanks again for your help; learned something new today...the best kind of days IMHO.

 

[Flint Ironstag]

I don't have a man page for this command on Big Sur. Z shell or bash.

 

[Bigwaff]

Man Page - macOS - SS64.com

ss64.com

“networkQuality” w/ uppercase “Q”

“speedtest” CLI needs to be downloaded from Ookla or use Brew package manager.