How to test speeds and strengths of wifi from macOS?

Question

I live in a house with multiple wireless radios and channels – some of which tend to be more reliable than others. I know that connecting to each one sequentially and then do a speed test in a browser would let me start to measure data, but software to assist with a batch test or automate network quality data collection would be helpful.

Is there a Mac app that will let me see the relative signal strengths and speeds of various base station radios?

Answer 1

The WiFi Explorer tool will show you all the wifi connections your computer is capable of seeing. I live in a high rise apartment building and I receive signals from about 50 other modems. WiFi explorer will plot the signal strength of all these or the SNR of these signals. It also gives the channel number of each one. Its an excellent diagnostic tool for WiFi.

The basic package is $20 but there is a lite version that is free. I'm not familar with the lite version so I don't know what it does. Since it's free it is probably worth a test drive. The basic version has a 3 day free trial. There is also a Pro Version for $100. It has a 7 day trial.

Answer 2

I live in a house with multiple routers – some of which tend to be more reliable than others.

Multiple routers? I'm assuming that there's only one Internet service and you're got multiple routers because they're off the shelf WiFi routers you've (or someone else) has configured as wireless access points. If it's consumer grade stuff, there's no doubt that some are more reliable than others. Consumer grade routers and WAPs are barely able to handle simple residential setups. If you need multiple APs because of a challenging layout, you might need something with a bit more oomph.

Analyzing your network

There are some really good wireless network analyzers out there, some going for hundreds, some in the thousands. Solar Winds makes some of the best out there and you can overlay their analysis with a graphical layout of your building and create "heat maps" so you can determine coverage. There are apps you can get that do similar, but nowhere near the accuracy.

For a home environment, you can do this for free with no additional software!

In the post, WiFi Performance via Terminal I explain how to get SNR (Signal to Noise Ratio) values using the built in airport utility. What you want to do, is get a rudimentary map of your house or apartment including all floors and go to the points where you often find yourself working (i.e. your favorite chair in the family room). Connect to that AP and make a note of the WiFi signal characteristics. If there are multiple APs connect to each one and note the signal characteristics for each on the map.

This will give you some good data:

• which APs perform better than the other
• areas in the house with strong/weak signals
• areas in the house that could use additional APs because of saturation

Get proper Access Points

Instead of getting a grab-bag of different routers, if your home is as "signal complex" as it's sounding, you need commercial grade access points. In the same post above WiFi Performance via Terminal I go on to highlight that it's better to have more APs but with the power turned down.

What I prefer to do is to deploy multiple APs around the house and turn down the transmit power so they don't go very far outside the room I am trying to cover. I personally use these PoE Access Points from Ubiquiti to cover several areas of my home with great success.

I like PoE (Power over Ethernet) because there's much less cabling (no power adapters to deal with). As for turning down the power, it's like setting up a sound system in a large area. You could put a single large speaker and crank it up, but unless you're sitting in the perfect spot, it will sound very distorted. It's much better to put multiple speakers and turn them down so "good" sound is heard in all of the area covered by that one speaker. I like the Ubiquiti Access Points because they do one thing and do it well - they provide wireless access.

If your house is as you describe it, you don't need to bodge together a mix of off-the-shelf routers. You actually have an "infrastructure" problem and you should attack it as such; you'll see an immediate and significant improvement of performance and reliability.