Put your Wi-Fi speed in the Mac menubar

The Wi-Fi icon at the top of your screen tells you signal strength and not much else. If you want to know whether you’re actually getting bandwidth — versus, say, connected to a router whose uplink is dead — you need a real throughput readout. macOS doesn’t ship one, but it’s easy to add.

The path

Option-click the Wi-Fi icon (sort of)

Hold Option and click the menu-bar Wi-Fi icon — you’ll see extra detail including Tx Rate, channel, BSSID, RSSI. Tx Rate is your link speed in Mbps, which gives you a ceiling but not actual usage.

In other words, it tells you what’s possible, not what’s happening. Useful for “am I connected to the 5 GHz band” but not “is something hogging the connection.”

A menu bar monitor

For live up/down throughput, you need a third-party menu-bar tool. Options include MenuMeters (free), Stats (free, open source), iStat Menus (subscription), and Beacon (one-time purchase).

The Beacon setup is:

1. Install Beacon.
2. Open Settings > Menu Bar and tick Network.
3. Pick a display style — arrows with separate up/down, a combined Mbps number, or a sparkline graph.
4. Switch units between MB/s and Mbps depending on whether you think in storage units or ISP marketing units.
5. Click the readout for top network-using processes.

That’s the whole setup. Beacon updates roughly once a second and shows zero traffic as a dash rather than a flashing zero, which keeps the bar quieter when you’re idle.

What you’ll spot once it’s there

Things you didn’t realise were happening:

• iCloud Photos uploading a big import while you’re on a hotel network.
• Time Machine to a NAS quietly using your whole upstream.
• A Zoom call still running in a backgrounded window after you “ended” it.
• A browser tab playing video you can’t see.
• macOS or an app updater pulling several gigabytes in the background.

You also start to recognise normal idle traffic — a Mac at rest still does a few KB/s of mDNS, keepalives, and iCloud heartbeats. Once you know what idle looks like, anomalies are obvious.

Bonus: signal strength

If you also want a signal readout in the bar (in dBm rather than the four-bar Apple icon), some monitors include it. Beacon doesn’t focus on RSSI specifically — for that, the built-in Wireless Diagnostics app (hold Option, click Wi-Fi icon, then Open Wireless Diagnostics, then Window > Performance) gives you a continuous graph. Useful if you’re chasing a specific Wi-Fi problem; overkill for daily use, where “am I getting bandwidth” is the real question.