“The quality of your Wi-Fi in every corner of your home or office can be a bit of a sticky wicket: Great in the reception area, not so hot by the copier,” Jeffery Battersby writes for Macworld. “Mediocre in the boss’ office and absolutely perfect near the last toilet in the bathroom.”
“The question is, how do you figure out what’s bad where and why so you can make adjustments and guarantee good Wi-Fi in the places you need it most,” Battersby writes. “With NetSpot, the Wi-Fi network survey tool. The app comes in there expense tiers: free for non-commercial use, $149 for a one-user-per-device license for the Pro version, $499 for a 10- user-per-device license.”
“NetSpot uses your portable Mac’s Wi-Fi and a hand drawn map or blueprint of your home or office to help you discover the quality of your network,” Battersby writes. “To create a survey you need to start with a map. If you’re fairly adept at drawing you can use NetSpot’s built-in drawing tools to create a floorpan of your office. Better yet, if you have any kind of image of your current floor plan, NetSpot can open most any kind of image file, which you can then use as the starting spot for your survey.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Mapping out your Wi-fi coverage can be very revealing and sometimes surprising. Getting strong coverage where you need it most is often well worth the price of tools like NetSpot.
Obviously I realise why people need portable WiFi mapping tools and have used them myself for many years. When I first used them a laptop was the only device that combined the portability with the functionality needed for the job, but this seems like the sort of task that would be very much better suited to an IOS device rather than a laptop,
However there are significant obstacles to doing this, mainly concerned with extracting suitable information from the RF chip in an unbroken IOS device. There’s an informative discussion about the problem on NetSpot’s web site
https://www.netspotapp.com/help/talk/topic/netspot-for-ipad/
Free version:
• Non-commercial use only
• 1 zone per project
$149 Pro version:
• More visualizations, larger surveys, advanced reports, extra features for business use.
• 1 User, 1 Mac
• up to 50 zones per project
$499 Enterprise version:
• Unlimited NetSpot features for a team of network experts.
• 10 Users, 10 Macs
• Unlimited zones