Boosting Wifi signal by picking a different channel

Here’s just a small writeup of a good way I found to boost your Wifi signal. If you’re living in a residential area, you’ve probably noticed how more and more people have their own wireless networks. Unfortunately, most of the hardware which is distributed today is set to transmit data in channel 6, which is the band around 2437 Mhz. You can check this excellent site for more info about Wifi frequencies.

Wifi frequency bands (from Geekzone)

You can probably see where this is going: a lot of hardware transmit data in the same frequency band, which causes a bit of trouble. If you’re suffering from a lot of connection loss, it might be a good idea to switch the transmit channel on on your router. It seems like the recommended tool for Windows is Netstumbler. If you’re using Linux, the regular iwscan can reveal what channels your neighbouring networks are running in.

I personally used the excellent Wifi Analyzer for android, which gave me a nice graph about the channel distribution in my neighbourhood. Caution when picking a new channel: some of the bands overlap, as you can see in the picture above.