We have a lot of Wi-Fi connections nearby and I'd like to know which band has the least interference.
I'd like to to know how many connections are on each band and pick the best to configure my router from that data.
You can get detailed information about a wireless interface by using the iwlist command.
Run the below command from the command line, just copy and paste:
sudo iwlist wlan0 scan | grep Frequency | sort | uniq -c | sort -n
And you will get a result like this:
2 Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
2 Frequency:2.417 GHz (Channel 2)
2 Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
10 Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)
As an extra bit of useful data, you can see what frequencies your wifi card supports using this command:
iwlist wlan0 channel
iwlist frequency
it gave out all the frequencies and the current one at end
Sep 4, 2021 at 13:54
Use LinSSID, a GUI program that will give you information about MAC addresses, channels and power signals.
Example screenshot of LinSSID:
Install wifi-radar from the repositories. It will show you what channel each network is using.
https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/precise/wifi-radar/
For simplicity, you can run iwconfig
in analogy to ifconfig
for listing wireless interfaces:
random@wxc-dell:~/$ iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
wlan0 IEEE 802.11 ESSID:"ABC"
Mode:Managed Frequency:5.745 GHz Access Point: 04:42:1A:7D:32:6C
Bit Rate=36 Mb/s Tx-Power=22 dBm
Retry short limit:7 RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Power Management:off
Link Quality=47/70 Signal level=-63 dBm
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:6516 Invalid misc:28646 Missed beacon:0
docker0 no wireless extensions.
tun0 no wireless extensions.