One of my Twitter friends pointed me to the folks at Nuts About Nets, and there's no doubt that my quick visit to the NAN website has already paid tangible dividends. One word, folks - NetSurveyor. You won't find a better FREE wireless network profiler out there; whether you're a bithead by trade (like me) or just a power user of home 802.11g/b/n wireless, you'll love this Windows application. The first thing I did was check channel usage, and I found that 9 of the 13 home WLANs in range of my home (including my own) were fighting on a single channel. One quick configuration change moved my WLAN to an otherwise unused (and non-overlapping) channel, and I saw immediate performance improvement in my home WLAN of 20+ devices. (For details of 802.11 channels and channel selection, NetGear has a good, basic explanation.)
Alongside NetSurveyor lies NetStress, an 802.11 benchmarking and stress-test tool. I'll be using NetStress in the near future, just to see what kind of boundaries I can push with my existing wireless infrastructure.
Get NetSurveyor - NOW.
Free Tools » Nuts About Nets
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