inSSIDer

Monitoring your Wi-Fi network is often done through your router's settings, but getting there can be a bit convoluted. What's more, navigating through the router's menus isn't the easiest of affairs, so people are put off by their complexity.

Thankfully, dedicated software to help you monitor your network connection is freely available and easy to download and set up. inSSIDer is one such program, accomplishing the tasks mentioned above without confusing the user, providing a thorough overview of their connection, along with advice to optimize it.

The first impression of this app is that it's quite an intuitive one. The first thing it'll show you is an overview of the networks in your area, all nicely draped in an easy-to-comprehend list.

The list features useful, at-a-glance information about the signal range, clients, channels, as well as the security, mode, and max rate of each detected connection.

The network you're on will be highlighted, and double-clicking it will bring up more detailed data: a signal strength graph will be displayed, along with other technical info, such as basic and max data rates, spatial streams, and more.

Upon navigating to the Network Dashboard, a few observations of the app might greet you right as you get there. In our case, the program advised us against using non-standard 2.4 GHz channels, as well as decreasing the width to 20 MHz for our network.

The explanations behind each observation can be illuminating: for instance, it motivated the channel width decrease to 20 MHz due to the 2.4 GHz band limitations, claiming that wider channels would only increase the retry rate for everyone, creating an unstable connection.

There's also an overview of your local network, which is supposed to display the clients connected to your router. Information about their IP and MAC addresses can be found there.

Overall, one can claim that inSSIDer is an easy program to use, affording users some helpful features to monitor their connection without any difficulties.