This is one of the coolest gadgets I've played around with in a long time. It's
an expensive prograde solution, but if you or a client is having an impossible
issue with a wireless network, it could absolutely save your bacon. Oh, and I'll
cover some more practical stuff for home users as well. Welcome to how to
optimize your Wi-Fi. I
guess the Flash Voyager GTX USB3 drive
from Corsair provides SSD- like performance and fits comfortably in your
pocket. Click now to learn more. Now, in a perfect fantasy world, only two Wi-Fi
devices would be in one place at one time, an access point and a single
client. That would work awesome. Unfortunately, in the real world, that's
not really how it goes down. and you'll have sometimes dozens of devices
chattering at the same time. Now, Wi-Fi devices are designed to be very polite
and not talk over each other. So, as long as they're all on the same channel,
every device will wait its turn to communicate, which means there's a
finite amount of communication that can be done per channel. Once you reach that
limit, you're pretty much done. There are a couple of solutions, though.
Solution number one is to change the operating channel of your wireless
equipment. But that needs to be done with care. If you or an inconsiderate
neighbor chooses overlapping channels, that complicates communication because
instead of every device waiting its turn to communicate, they'll all just kind of
try to yell on top of each other. So, choose non-over overlapping channels.
The problem is that in the 2.4 GHz band, there are only three non-over
overlapping channels. So that's still a very finite amount of communication that
can be done. Which leads to solution number two. Reduce other wireless
signals. This can be done by asking very close neighbors to kindly turn down
their antenna strength, by turning off unnecessary Wi-Fi hotspots, and by
wiring up as many devices as you can so not every piece of electronic gear in
your house is competing for airtime. This kind of tweaking is actually pretty
easy to do with either Metaggeek's in SSID or 4 tool or an Android app like
Wi-Fi Analyzer. But what if these solutions? What if these solutions don't
work? It's possible there's a non-ifi
device interfering with your network. Switching to newer dualband 5 gigahertz
wireless equipment is one solution that will probably work because while ranges
are slightly reduced, there are many more available channels and much less
equipment that uses them. But in an office environment where you can't
control what people are using or even in the home, it's not always an option. So
this is the Wispy DBX from Metgeek. This
professional-grade device combined with the Wi-Fi card in your PC and MetaGeek's
channelizer software is a powerful spectrum analysis tool that lets you
visualize the 2.4 GHz or 5 GHz wireless
activity around you, including both Wi-Fi networks and non-ifi compliant
interferers. The device itself is pretty straightforward. Included in the box is
this little black box, an antenna, a USB
2 cable, and a little clip that you can use to attach it to your PC. Like so.
This is the way I'd recommend using it since diagnosing interference is often
going to be a pretty active process with a lot of running around. Let's get into
the software. So, first we'll take a look at both density and waterfall view,
which show real time and historical
wireless activity. and they both use the x-axis to show which channel the signal
is being transmitted on, but you still use them a little bit differently. So,
density view shows us the amplitude of the activity on the y-axis, so how loud
a device is talking, and uses color coding from blue to red to indicate how
often it's talking. This red blip right here is transmitting all the time, but
it's not very loud. While the one here only transmits around 10% of the time,
but is so loud that it's either very powerful or very close by. Waterfall
view works more like a seismma graph, where the amplitude of the signal is
colorcoded now, and how often it happens is represented by how often the dots
appear in a vertical line. So, back to our previous examples, that red spot now
has a constant blue color code, and we see lots and lots and lots of activity
in that line, while the tall blue peak has less frequent but red color-coded
activity. One more trick here is that we can use the navigation feature on the
left as kind of a PVR to see anything from a short recent 30-cond snapshot for
on the-fly diagnosis of issues to hours of recorded activity to get a really
clear idea of what's going on in that area throughout the day. Just don't
forget to create sessions so you know where you were and what you were trying
to monitor at the time. All right, so enough theory. I promise this was a cool
gadget. Let's play with it, shall we? Here's the 2.4 GHz frequency range
around the office. Lots of SSIDs. We can see them broadcasting with that faint
blue halo. Um, some of them are strong, others aren't. None of them have
particularly intense activity going on for now. One thing you might notice if
we overlay the Wi-Fi networks though is that the configuration here is a total
mess. One of ours is on channel 2 and seems to have autoconfigured itself to
40 MHz. A performance boost in theory, but with so much other traffic going on
around here, uh, it's probably not helping anyone. And there are a couple
of other nearby networks on overlapping channels, too. But that stuff's easy. We
don't need a fancy tool for that. So, let's take a look at what different
kinds of traffic look like. This is kind of cool. So, this is what low bit rate
buffered video playback on a mobile phone looks like when we have our
spectrum analyzer. These short bursts mean that we're nowhere near saturating
our connection. This, on the other hand, is what high bit rate 1080p playback
looks like. Not nearly as many gaps between data transmission in order to
build the buffer. Might have a hard time running multiple streams of this at the
same time. And then, haha, big leagues now. NVIDIA game stream. This is why
they have a recommended list of highquality routers to stream games over
your Wi-Fi network. There is no buffer time in between transmission because low
latency is key. So data needs to be moving constantly and without any
interruptions. But all of this is stuff that's relatively easy to diagnose cuz
it's Wi-Fi gear. What about the real reason we got this tool? Non Wi-Fi stuff.
Whoa there. What's that? Out of nowhere,
we've got a device hopping around, thankfully outside of our Wi-Fi
channels, whose red color indicates at least 50% airtime use. This one, in this
case, it's a G930 headphone from Logitech wireless headphones. This one
is well behaved, but many devices like baby monitors will accidentally jump on
top of your Wi-Fi from time to time, causing interruptions. Now, you know,
switching over to 5 GHz, the first things that jump out are how little
background interference there is and how many more channels are available. If I
had capable gear, I could actually spread right out and run a couple of 40
MHz or even 80 MHz quadruple wide channel access points for massive
throughput. Sweet, right? There's not much to see here otherwise, but just for
fun, let's have a look at what it looks like if I run IPF on my phone to
simulate heavy network activity and then truck myself downstairs where the access
point is. The intensity of the activity
doesn't change in the density view, but you can see the amplitude increases
dramatically. So, this hot and cold style of discovery based on the strength
of the signal can actually be used in some really interesting ways. Let's pop
back over to 2.4 GHz for a second. What
the heck are these two blue spikes here that don't look like Wi-Fi? They don't
have a Wi-Fi shape. The software lets us
find out by using the inspector feature to highlight them and basically run
around with the laptop looking for the signal strength to increase or decrease.
Turns out it was a 2.4 GHz RC airplane
radio. It's things like this and other non-ifi 2.4 4 GHz and 5 GHz stuff that
can be infuriating to diagnose without a tool like this. But if at this point
you're sitting there thinking, "Okay, Lionus, so I spend $1,000 on a piece of
hardware and software license so that I can yell at the neighbor kid for flying
his dub plane. Are you dumb?" No. The Y
Spy, the less expensive 2.4 GHz only model, and the YSPY DBX are for pros who
set up like Wi-Fi networks for a living. For normal people, there's the stuff I
mentioned before or Wi-Fi Helper, which is a wizard-based $10 tool that walks
you through optimizing your network. Probably a better bet, unless you've got
like, I don't know, a microwave next to your computer that's constantly running.
That's what it looks like, by the way. No wonder you can't stream video while
you're cooking your Hot Pocket. Am I right? Anyway, guys, thanks for
watching. Like the video if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment with suggestions for future
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