If you live in an apartment complex, you’ve probably noticed more than just the passive-aggressive network IDs that your neighbors use—very likely you’ve had problems with your wireless connections dropping out, or just not being as fast as you’d like. This often has to do with the Wi-Fi channels in your area. If you’re on the same Wi-Fi channel as a lot of your neighbors, you’ll experience a lot of interference with their networks—so it’s best to choose a different channel with fewer people on it. When you do, you’ll reduce that interference. The first step, though, is finding out which channel is least congested in your area. These tools will help you identify which nearby networks are using which channels.

Note that Wi-Fi channels overlap with nearby channels. Channels 1, 6, and 11 are the most frequently used for 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi, and these three are the only ones that don’t overlap with each other. Windows: on Windows, but it’s become paid software. You probably don’t want to pay $20 just to figure out which Wi-Fi channel is ideal, so use a free tool instead. Is very powerful, but it’s a bit overkill for this. We liked NIrSoft’s WifiInfoView instead — its simple interface does the job and it doesn’t need any installation.

Launch the tool, locate the Channel header, and click it to sort by Wi-Fi channel. Here, we can see that channel 6 looks a bit cluttered — we might want to switch to channel 1 instead. Mac: Wireless Diagnostics Believe it or not, macOS actually has this feature integrated. To access it, hold the Option key and click the Wi-Fi icon on the menu bar at the top of your screen.

Select “Open Wireless Diagnostics.” Ignore the wizard that appears. Instead, click the Window menu and select Utilities. Select the Wi-Fi Scan tab and click Scan Now. The “Best 2.4 GHz Channels” and “Best 5 GHz” Channels” fields will recommend the ideal Wi-Fi channels you should be using on your router. Linux: The iwlist Command You could use a graphical app like Wifi Radar for this on Linux, but you’d have to install it first. Instead, you might as well just use the terminal. The command here is installed by default on Ubuntu and other, so it’s the fastest method.

In order to access the Wireless Diagnostics feature, you will need to follow a couple of super simple steps. Step 1: Hold down the Option key while clicking the Wi-Fi icon on the Mac’s menu bar. Step 2: Next, choose ‘Open Wireless Diagnostics.’ Step 3: Now you need to click ‘Continue’ and enter your username and password. On Windows, you can use a built-in but not so intuitive console application called netsh to gather wireless network information like SSID, signal, channel, WLAN network and radio type, authentication and encryption protocol, AP MAC address, etc.

Open a Terminal and run the following command: sudo iwlist wlan0 scan grep (Channel Read the output of the command to see which channels are the most congested and make your decision. Google calendar app for mac os x. In the screenshot below, channel 1 looks the least congested. Android: RELATED: If you want to search for Wi-Fi channels on your phone instead of your PC, the easiest-to-use application we’ve found is Wifi Analyzer on Android. Just install the free app from Google Play and launch it. You’ll see an overview of the wireless networks in your area and which channels they’re using.