Get the Fastest Speed on Your Wireless Network With Wifi Explorer for Mac
macOS: It’s important to know how to set up a wireless router because not every router can automatically configure its wireless settings to ensure the best connection. This, along with a great Wi-Fi analysis app, can help you identify areas of your home or apartment that may need additional wireless support – either by adding another hotspot or by modifying an existing configuration.
This app is worth it
Despite being an expensive $ 20 macOS Wi-Fi Explorer app, it’s worth the price of a few burritos. It shows you perfectly every wireless network your laptop can find in a specific area. More importantly, it puts it all in two handy graphs – one for the 2.4GHz band and one for the 5GHz band to show you which channels might be congested by competing networks.
Why is it important? Whenever possible, you want your wireless network to be on a channel that is as free of interference from other wireless networks as possible. If you run your Wi-Fi network on a channel filled with other Wi-Fi networks, your speed may suffer. As MacWorld described in a 2013 article:
“To test this theory, I brought the same indoor suburban distance test into a long hallway in our seven-story office building in San Francisco’s South Park area. My MacBook found 25 networks at home; saw 150 in the office.
Within 6 feet of the Time Capsule, our average throughput was 489 Mbps, 11 percent less than commuter speed. At 26 feet, the office speed dropped to 305 Mbps, 33 percent slower than the commuter test from the same distance. At 54 feet, the indoor test was 44 percent slower than in my quiet area. And at 78 feet, the speed in my office was 51 percent lower than the speed I reached in front of my house at the same distance. ”
Select channels manually
If your router cannot choose the best channel for you, or the choice is terrible, you should manually configure the Wi-Fi settings in your router’s interface. Try sticking to channels 1, 6, or 11 on 2.4 GHz – three non-overlapping channels – and one of 23 different non-overlapping 5 GHz channels. (You have a lot more flexibility here.)
If you don’t want to pay
And if you really don’t want to shell out $ 20 for a great app, you can sort of perform the same channel scan in macOS itself. In Spotlight, type “wireless diagnostics” and download the app that appears at the top of your results. Ignore his on-screen prompt; instead, click Window and then Scan.
While you won’t have good graphs, you can sort all found wireless networks by channel to understand what’s overcrowded and what’s not – remember, lower RSSI values indicate a weaker signal, so a channel with a lot of weak wireless networks can be a better choice for your wireless network than a channel with one or two strong competing networks.