Atheros powerline devices automatically compute their average PHY rate which can be read and displayed. Average PHY rate is an indication of performance and can be affected by attenuation and ambient powerline noise. Program int6krate is designed to report the average PHY rate.

int6krate -xni ${NIC2}
if [ ${?} != 0 ]; then
        echo "Network did not converge"
        exit 1
fi

The example above uses int6krate to read and display the average TX and RX PHY rates for the device connected to Ethernet interface NIC2. Option -n requests PHY rates. Option -x exits with a status that can be tested in the subsequent “if” statement. Output appears in fix-width columns to facilitate post-processing. Other ways to obtain PHY rates are “int6k -m” and “int6kstat -t”.