If you are a geek like us, you will find this trick very helpful on
diagnosis your wireless network experience. Particularly wireless
interference, if you are living in a crowed neighborhoods.
You can run the following command on your Windows 7 or Vista to find
more details about all your neighbor’s wireless network.
netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid
As you can see, this command will show you all the wireless network
your card detects. Not only that it will give you information such as
their Signal Strength, Channel, Radio Type,
Authentication Method, Encryption Method, etc.
Some real hacker will use such exposed information to target an
attack on particular network, in fact lifehacker has an excellent
article on how to hack WEP based Encryption Wi-Fi network.
Since we aren’t the real hacker, we won’t go deeper on
this topic, rather we can talk about how you can improve your network
experience from such information.
Improve by selecting a different Channel
The first obvious choice is to select a different channel, why so ?
Little you may already know, your 802.11g/n wireless device is
usually operating on 2.4 GHz frequency. By selecting different channel
your wireless network will have a distinct frequency different by 5 MHz.
For example, by default, 2.4 GHz won’t operating at exact 2400 MHz
frequency, rather the first channel on this category is operating at
2412 MHz, if you keep adding 5 MHz bandwidth per channel, channel 6 will
then operating at the frequency of 2437 MHz. However, that being said,
your router won’t just operating on this exact frequency, it usually
will cover a range of 25 MHz per channel, which means if you want to
complete avoid the other channel you need to select at least 5 channels
apart. (5×5 = 25 MHz) And there is only 1-11 channels available for
average consumers. (note: with the latest 802.11n it will use
as much as 40 MHz per channel.)
By selecting a different channel will definitely help to improve any
interference you might experienced before. However, that said, you need
to also keep in mind your other wireless device at home. Things like
your wireless home phone (if its targeted at 2.4 GHz frequency),
Microwave oven (at a frequency near 2.45 GHz) usually will also
interfere with your Wi-Fi signal, also keep in mind Bluetooth device is
also using 2.4 GHz frequency.
Enjoy.
