If you’ve been researching WiFi signal strength booster techniques on the Internet, you’ve probably found a whole bunch of tips involving homemade antennas and various contraptions ranging from ingenious to plain weird.
The truth is that the best WiFi booster techniques are also the most basic. If you want to increase the strength of your WiFi network and extend it to cover your entire home, you should figure out where’s the best place to install your router.
Sometimes, a one-meter difference in router placement is the difference between strong and mediocre signal.
Some WiFi booster apps such as NetSpot make it possible to create a detailed heat map showing the strength of your WiFi coverage. Just like a weather map shows areas of exceptionally hot or cold temperatures, so does a signal heat map show the areas where your WiFi router doesn’t reach.
A signal heat map is a great starting point on your way towards a stronger WiFi as it allows you to determine the effectiveness of various WiFi booster techniques. With the help of NetSpot, you can quickly and easily determine which router placement works the best and adjust accordingly.
Likewise, NetSpot and many other WiFi booster apps allow you to boost WiFi signal by exposing overused WiFi channels, which are like the lines on the highway. When all cars drive in a single line, you can expect traffic jams to occur and everyone to move slowly. But as soon as you switch to a different line, you can increase your travel speed because there are no cars in your way blocking you, and the same goes for WiFi channels.
The good news is that the best WiFi booster apps available are neither expensive nor difficult to use, as demonstrated by our top pick: NetSpot.
NetSpot is our favorite WiFi booster app because it has successfully combined professional features with simplicity and usability. If you’re a casual computer user who just wants to optimize the performance of a single WiFi network, NetSpot has you covered with not one but two WiFi analysis modes: one for quick scans and the other one for in-depth surveys.
If you’re a professional IT administrator who wants to use NetSpot to optimize enterprise networks, you’ll be pleasantly surprised to learn just how much can such an easy to use tool as NetSpot do for you.
WiFi Manager is a popular Android WiFi booster app that you can use to discover WiFi networks in your area to pick the least cluttered channel for your own network. The app is compatible with Android 6 and newer, and it can be downloaded from Play Store for free. While not offering many features, WiFi Manager has made it to the top of our list because of how convenient it is to have a solid booster app on a smartphone.
With WiFi Manager installed on your smartphone, you can walk from room to room to discover where your WiFi signal is the strongest and where it is the weakest.
Just like WiFi Manager, WiFi Analyzer is a simple utility for quick discovery of nearby WiFi networks. It can be downloaded from Microsoft Store and works on all versions of the Windows 10 operating system. What WiFi Analyzer lacks in terms of functionality is compensated by its well-designed user interface.
We recommend WiFi Analyzer for quickly discovering which WiFi channels in your area are overused and which are cluttered the least.
Wireshark is a free and open source packet analyzer used by network administrators and other IT professionals for network troubleshooting and analysis. It supports a number of communication protocols besides WiFi, and it runs on virtually all modern operating systems. Wireshark is a complex tool designed to solve complex issues.
If you’re a regular home user, you may find it too difficult to use even with the help of various online tutorials. What’s more, to use Wireshark to its maximum potential, you need to have a compatible WiFi card that supports all Wireshark’s network analysis modes.
Acrylic is a free Wi-Fi network scanner for Windows capable of scanning 802.11/a/b/g/n/ac networks on 2.4 and 5Ghz wireless frequencies.
The tool lists wireless networks with all details such as encryption, channel, and MAC address, conveniently drawing signal and strength level graphs to provide you with an easy-to-understand graphical overview of the wireless activity around you.
