WiFiman — Before Saying “The Wi-Fi Is Acting Up”...

The Wi-Fi isn't working properly.

The first instinct is often to check the signal strength. And when all those little bars are there, things immediately become less obvious: on paper, everything should be working.

I learned the hard way, however, that a good signal doesn't necessarily mean a healthy Wi-Fi network.

That's something I discovered thanks in part to WiFiman, a small free tool I honestly wish I'd known about sooner. Behind its sometimes slightly overwhelming interface is enough information to make a lot of network problems considerably less mysterious.

And you don't need to be a network engineer to get something useful out of it.

For those in a hurry...

And yet, everything seemed to be working...

I'd been using Wi-Fi for years without knowing about WiFiman.

And for quite a while, I had a rather annoying problem at home: the network generally worked fine, but some devices would regularly behave strangely. Slowdowns, dropped connections, things that were difficult to reproduce... In short, enough to know there was a problem, but not enough to immediately understand what it was.

The most annoying part was that everything seemed to be in order.

Coverage was good, the signal was good, the access points were properly positioned and nothing really stood out.

Until one day, WiFiman showed me something I hadn't considered at all.

One of my access points was simply saturated.

Full bars, but not enough chairs

The problem wasn't the amount of data passing through the access point.

It was the number of devices simultaneously asking for a seat.

That access point dated from a time when a typical home had a few computers, a few phones and, if you were lucky, a Wi-Fi printer.

Things had changed slightly in my house since then.

Phones, tablets, TVs, connected devices, various modules... even when they're barely using any bandwidth, they're still clients the access point has to manage.

My old AP had simply reached a limit it had probably never been designed to handle.

So where does WiFiman come into this?

WiFiman obviously didn't fix my access point.

It simply allowed me to see something I wasn't looking at.

And that's probably the best way to sum up what I like about this tool: it makes things visible that would otherwise remain fairly abstract.

A few very practical uses

WiFiman can do quite a lot and, the first time you open it, the amount of information on screen can even be a little intimidating.

But you don't need to understand everything before you can start getting something useful out of it.

So rather than going through all its features, here are a few very ordinary situations where it can help you understand what's going on.

“The Wi-Fi is bad in this room”

This is probably the most obvious one.

By walking around with your phone, WiFiman lets you see how the signal quality actually changes and just how much it can vary from one place to another.

It won't necessarily give you the solution straight away, but it can at least confirm whether the problem you're experiencing really is a coverage problem.

And sometimes, moving an access point slightly — or simply discovering that a particularly well-built wall happens to be in exactly the wrong place — is enough to explain quite a lot.

“I've got full bars, but it's still slow”

As we've just seen, a good signal essentially means that your device can hear the access point properly. It doesn't mean that everything behind it is working properly.

An access point can be overloaded, have too many clients to manage or be struggling with other issues while your phone proudly continues to display full bars.

That's precisely what made my own problem so difficult to identify at first.

The signal was good. The Wi-Fi, not so much.

“There's Wi-Fi everywhere around me”

In a reasonably dense area, you only need to open the list of available networks to realise that you're rarely alone.

WiFiman lets you visualise nearby networks, the bands and channels they're using, as well as their signal levels.

Without becoming a radio-frequency specialist, you can already start to understand why having several Wi-Fi networks stepping on each other's toes doesn't exactly help, and why channel selection can matter.

It's also a fairly simple way of starting to put a picture to something as abstract as Wi-Fi interference.

“Is it my Wi-Fi or my Internet connection that's acting up?”

When a web page takes three seconds to load, the conclusion is often pretty quick:

“The Wi-Fi is acting up.”

Maybe.

But the problem could also be somewhere else.

The various speed, latency and connectivity tests available in WiFiman can provide a few clues to help distinguish what's happening on the local network from what's happening further upstream.

Again, the idea isn't to get an automatic diagnosis, but simply to avoid immediately looking in the wrong place.

“Where did that thing go?”

This one becomes particularly useful once you start accumulating connected devices.

You plug in a new device. It connects to the network. Great.

Now what?

WiFiman can discover devices present on the network, making it a convenient way to check whether something is actually connected or simply find the IP address it was assigned.

It's probably not the application's most spectacular feature.

But it's certainly one of those that can save quite a bit of time.

---

There are obviously other possibilities, and some features become considerably more useful when WiFiman is used with UniFi hardware.

But for many ordinary problems, a few fairly simple pieces of information are already enough to go from:

“Something's broken.”

to:

“Ah... something's happening there.”

And that's already a lot.

So, is it worth it?

WiFiman isn't going to fix your network.

Nor will it systematically tell you why your Wi-Fi isn't working properly, and some of the information it displays will probably require a little extra research to understand.

But that's not really what I expect from it.

Since discovering it, I've pulled it out several times for quite different problems.

It has rarely given me the solution directly.

But it has very often shown me where to start looking.

And that's probably what I like most about this tool: even without being a network specialist, it lets you see a little further than those few Wi-Fi bars we usually rely on.

There are obviously things it can't see. WiFiman isn't a spectrum analyzer: it lets you observe the Wi-Fi environment, but not all the radio activity that may be happening around you.

So you still need to keep a little perspective on what it's showing you.

But WiFiman is free.

So rather than showing you a series of screenshots here that might be outdated six months from now, the simplest thing is probably to install it and see what it has to say about your network.

Worst case, you spend a few minutes with it and it doesn't give you the answer you were looking for.

Best case, you discover something you didn't even know was there.

Personally, I mostly wish I'd discovered it sooner.