[Macworld]

Post your comments for Evaluating the strength of your AirPort network here

[JimB]

Nice. Now how do we do this with an iOS device?

[dejees]

How might you do something similar in testing Ethernet throughput on your network. For example, if in theory your are running a gigabit Ethernet network, what kind of speed throughput would you expect your devices to see? And or how might you go about testing this? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[Tom]

Is there software that can get me this info on an iOS device?

[ecormany]

one of the best ways to get a graphical view of your wifi signal is to use NetSpot http://www.netspotapp.com/

one drawback of NetSpot is that you have to provide a map of the rooms where you want to measure signal strength. to the rescue is MagicPlan https://itunes.apple...d427424432?mt=8, an iOS app designed for realtors that lets you draw floor plans in an interactive augmented reality view…it sounds odd, but it's easy. and it lets you export one floorplan free in its demo mode.

after about 20 minutes of work in the two apps, the end result is something like this: http://mlkshk.com/p/JSIV if your heat map looks bad, move your wifi point and run NetSpot again.

[seho]

Another vote for Netspot here. I used it to map wifi signals for a local elementary school and church last week. Made it easy to determine where to place a wifi extender for the upper grades classroom; the students are delighted, as their new iPads are working much better now.

As for an iOS solution, the short answer is that there won't be one, until and unless Apple provides a wifi sdk for ios developers.

[Droid]

Considering Apple pioneered getting WiFi into devices their App Store rules leave users in the cold for actually managing these devices for iOS.

Google Play has Inssider and WiFi Analyser available for free on Android.
Both apps give you a clear view of the signal strength and channels available and in use by other networks within range. Wonder round the location & you soon see that all the neighbouring 'BT/ Sky/ Virgin' base stations are all broadcasting on one end of the range, so you move away :^)

It's similar to Netspot that ecormany mentioned, but works in your palm.

There seems to be a Cydia version of Wifi Analyser if you want to jailbreak iOS.

[macreader]

iStumbler still works well and it's much easier. http://istumbler.net

[icerabbit]

dejees, on 19 November 2012 - 06:44 AM, said:

How might you do something similar in testing Ethernet throughput on your network. For example, if in theory your are running a gigabit Ethernet network, what kind of speed throughput would you expect your devices to see? And or how might you go about testing this? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

A simple test is to copy or move a 1GB or bigger file between two systems.

Fire up Activity Monitor and click the Network button

Then copy the file in Finder to another system and keep an eye on the network speed activity monitor.

A utility like MenuMeters or iStatMenus helps to keep an eye on network speed on a continuous basis.

Some rough real world personal experience: with fast ethernet you get about 10-12MB/s where with gigabit ethernet you can approach 100MB/s but may start to run into issues with network protocol, overhead, machine speed and the speed of the hard drive you are reading from and/or copying to. My one mac mini will copy to an older mac mini at 80+MB/s for instance. I can write to one NAS at the other side of the building (jumping a few switches and some long lines) at 40-50MB/s while writing to another gigabit NAS that is actually closer on the line only nets a dozen MB/s, I suspect that is slow due to the slower "green" hard drives running at 5400rpm, and some protocol issue with the older firmware on that NAS unit.

Also, batches of smaller files transfer a lot slower than a few big ones of the same overall size; as each individual file takes time to start & stop, get acknowledged, initiate the next file ... in layman's terms So, that's why one can only continuous top speed throughput with larger files.

This post has been edited by icerabbit: 19 November 2012 - 12:30 PM

[JerryNaples]

Thanks Chris for this article

I had been using Option click on the fan in the menu bar to get a display of many technical items. Some of which I understood and others that I admit I don't really don't.

Is RSSI an alternative to the S/N? What is MCS index? Or Transmit Rate?

Maybe a followup article on the Option Click view of the fan would be of interest to your readers

jerry / Naples

[mc4o1993]

Quote

Nice. Now how do we do this with an iOS device?

I don't think apple makes this info available via a public API, so my guess is you'll have to jailbreak if you want something like this on your ios devices.

[BrianM]

Quote

Nice. Now how do we do this with an iOS device?

There used to be some Apps around iOS 3, but because Apple did not make the WiFi API's available, they were either removed completely, or just could not get updates. One such app that I have still works on my original iPod touch running iOS 4 which I keep around just for this purpose when setting up routers for customers, or fixing "wifi issues" for them.

I do hope that some day they open up the WiFi API enough to allow this kind of App again, it is very useful compared with having to have a laptop with me (or installing software onto customer systems)

[Chris Breen]

JerryNaples, on 19 November 2012 - 01:19 PM, said:

Thanks Chris for this article

I had been using Option click on the fan in the menu bar to get a display of many technical items. Some of which I understood and others that I admit I don't really don't.

Is RSSI an alternative to the S/N? What is MCS index? Or Transmit Rate?

Maybe a followup article on the Option Click view of the fan would be of interest to your readers

jerry / Naples

Glenn Fleishman put together a very good article for TidBITS about this very thing. You can find it here.

[spanky]

One other solution is setting up a WDS. This would make another good article.