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  • Wi-Fi Site Surveys, Analysis, Troubleshooting
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WiFi Site Survey Software

INCREASINGLY MANY DEVICES AND APPLIANCES CAN’T CONNECT TO THE INTERNET ANY OTHER WAY, MAKING IT MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER FOR BUSINESSES AND HOUSEHOLDS TO ELIMINATE SIGNAL DEAD ZONES USING NETSPOT WIFI SITE SURVEY SOFTWARE.
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  • NetSpot
  • Wi-Fi Site Surveys, Analysis, Troubleshooting
  • 4.8
  • 969 User reviews

A WiFi site survey is the process of assessing a specific area to plan or optimize a wireless network capable of covering the entire area with a strong, reliable signal.

What is a WiFi Site Survey?

The typical WiFi site survey is concerned with the following:

  • The number of access points: It’s not always possible for a single access point to cover the entire surveyed area with a strong WiFi signal. Universities, large businesses, hospitals, museums, and other large public and private places typically rely on multiple access points to provide the desired coverage and capacity.
  • Access point placement: Just because wireless access points can be placed virtually anywhere doesn’t mean that all possible placements are equally recommendable. In fact, a poorly placed access point is often as good as no access point at all, which is why it’s necessary to use wireless site survey software to determine where access points need to be located.
  • Interference: WiFi networks are susceptible to interference from other WiFi networks, electrical devices, and objects that absorb WiFi signals. The best survey software for WiFi network design and optimization can analyze interference and make it easy to see what needs to be done to avoid it.

Why Do You Need to Perform a WiFi Site Survey?

The complexity of WiFi networks is constantly growing, and so does our reliance on them. A WiFi site survey can help you ensure that your WiFi network is in top condition, ready to support your personal or business needs.

Reduce Downtime

According to Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute. That’s a huge number, and all businesses that rely on WiFi internet access should remember it because it makes the cost of wireless site survey software seem utterly insignificant, especially considering that free survey software is often enough to optimize a WiFi network and reduce downtime.

Provide Sufficient Coverage and Capacity

Without a WiFi site survey, it’s very difficult — if not impossible — to know that you have sufficient WiFi coverage and capacity to meet your needs. Insufficient coverage means that not all clients will be able to roam freely and connect to the internet from anywhere. And if your WiFi network doesn’t meet your capacity needs in peak locations, you may deal with disconnected clients and slow speeds.

Keep Costs Down

Designing a WiFi network without wireless site survey software is akin to building a house without a plan. If you’re experienced enough and luck is on your side, you might end up with something that satisfies your needs, but it’s very unlikely that there wasn’t a better way how to complete the project. By performing a WiFi site survey prior to deployment, you can ensure that you’re deploying the right number of access points in the right locations to keep your costs down.

Boost Productivity

When employees have access to a fast and stable internet, they become more productive, and the same is true for home users. The difference between a website loading in one second and two seconds may not seem significant, but that’s only until you multiply the time saved by the total number of internet users and look a year into the future.

Increase Security

Wireless site survey software can reveal rogue access points set up by malicious hackers to steal personal information from unsuspecting users. It can also help you limit the reach of your wireless network to ensure that it doesn’t leave your building and allow someone who you can’t even see to breach it.

How to Select the Best Software Tool for WiFi Site Surveys?

Your choice of wireless site survey software should depend on the type of site survey you want to perform:

  • Passive survey: During a passive survey, there’s no need to establish a connection with an access point because the goal is to gather information about all access points in the area, including their names, wireless channels, signal strength, and so on. A passive survey is great for identifying rogue access points and obtaining a high-level view of the surveyed area in terms of WiFi activity.
  • Active survey: To perform an active survey, it’s necessary to establish a connection with the surveyed access point. An active survey measures round-trip time, throughput rates, packet loss, and retransmissions, among other things. This type of site survey is used to troubleshoot a single WiFi network.
  • Predictive survey: Performed prior to deployment, a predictive survey creates a simulated model of a wireless network and its interaction with barriers like walls or large objects. Predictive surveys can be performed without any type of field measurements.

Passive and active surveys require a compatible off-the-shelf WiFi adapter, but no additional hardware is required. Predictive surveys can be performed even on a computer that doesn’t connect to WiFi.

select wireless site survey software capable of performing passive, active, and predictive surveys

Instead of using a different software tool for each type of site survey, it’s much better to select wireless site survey software capable of performing passive, active, and predictive surveys. The software you select should support all WiFi standards, including WiFi 6 and run on both Windows and Mac computers. It should also be intuitive and make the process as simple as possible so that you’re encouraged to use it.

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Top 5 Best WiFi Site Survey Software Tools

Performing a WiFi site survey is always much easier when you have the right tool for the job. Today, both home users and professionals can choose from such a wide range of WiFi site survey software tools that the sheer number of tools available can be overwhelming. To help you separate the wheat from the chaff, here’s our selection of the top 5 best WiFi site survey software tools.

#1
NetSpot — is the best WiFi site survey software tool .
#2
VisiWave Site Survey — is a proprietary WiFi site survey software tool with GPS support and extensive reporting capabilities.
#3
TamoGraph Site Survey — includes a powerful spectrum analyzer capable of detecting and identifying non-Wi-Fi sources of RF signals, such as wireless video cameras, microwave ovens, or cordless phones.
#4
iBwave Wi-Fi — is a feature-packed WiFi site survey software suite that delivers a unique cloud-based user experience.
#5
Ekahau HeatMapper — is a simplified version of Ekahau Pro.

choice #1
Available for MacBook (macOS 10.10+) or any laptop (Windows 7/8/10/11) with a standard 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax wireless network adapter.
  • 4.8
  • 969 User reviews
  • 500K
  • Users

What home users and professionals have in common is a strong preference for easy-to-use software applications that don’t require a lengthy manual to deliver outstanding results. NetSpot is the best WiFi site survey software tool because it’s the only professional solution available that even home users without any expert knowledge can use to optimize WiFi networks.

  • Discover mode

    Reflects the rate of data transfer from user to the Internet.
  • Survey mode

    Available on any MacBook with macOS and PC laptop on Windows.

With NetSpot, visualizing, managing, troubleshooting, auditing, planning, and deploying wireless networks is as easy as clicking on a button. Depending on what information you want to gather, you can either generate a real-time view of surrounding Wi-Fi networks using Discover Mode or switch to Survey Mode and outline a WiFi network on an interactive map. The data you collect can be exported in PDF or CSV for further analysis or sharing.

NetSpot — Discover Mode

The current version of NetSpot offers over 15 heatmap visualizations, allowing you to see everything from noise level to frequency band coverage to signal-to-interference ratio. In the near future, NetSpot will include support for predictive surveys. Once this feature is implemented, NetSpot users will be able to plan new networks without visiting the designated area.


choice #2
Available for Windows.
  • 3.9
  • 3.9 out of 5

Developed by AZO Technologies, VisiWave Site Survey is a proprietary WiFi site survey software tool with GPS support and extensive reporting capabilities. It provides three different WiFi site survey methods. You can manually collect data one point at a time, continuously walk through the surveyed area, or use GPS positioning to automate large-scale outdoor surveys.

VisiWave Site Survey

The Pro version of VisiWave Site Survey includes support for predictive surveys, allowing you to create a realistic model of the survey area and simulate the interaction of radio waves with walls and other objects in the area. The result of this effort is a heatmap that clearly visualizes how signals from one or multiple sources will likely propagate through the area.


choice #3
Available for Windows and macOS.

This WiFi site survey software tool boasts the ability to analyze 802.11ax networks, as well as 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11g, 802.11n, and 802.11ac networks. The tool is available in two versions, and both versions cost over $1,000. The more expensive version of TomoGraph Site Survey adds support of access point simulation and predictive modeling of signal propagation.

TomoGraph Site Survey

Included in TomoGraph Site Survey is a powerful spectrum analyzer capable of detecting and identifying non-Wi-Fi sources of RF signals, such as wireless video cameras, microwave ovens, or cordless phones. This feature is intended to work with Wi-Spy, which is a compact 2.4 and 5 GHz spectrum analyzer that connects to the USB port.


choice #4
Available for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Aimed at professional users, iBwave Wi-Fi is a feature-packed WiFi site survey software suite that delivers a unique cloud-based user experience. You can start a WiFi survey on a tablet, save all your files to the cloud, and open the files on a desktop computer to create a highly accurate 3D model of the surveyed area. Customers and stakeholders can then view the model, as well as all gathered data, using iBwave Viewer, a free, read-only version of iBwave Wi-Fi.

IBwave Wi-Fi

To justify its steep price, iBwave Wi-Fi includes many enterprise-oriented features, such as a complete bill of materials, smart antenna contouring, automatic cable routing alignment, and others. Customers can watch videos of iBwave Wi-Fi online or order a live product demonstration.


choice #5
Available for Windows.

Ekahau HeatMapper is a simplified version of Ekahau Pro. Unlike its big brother, Ekahau HeatMapper runs only on Windows, and it’s aimed at home users who need only basic functionality and wouldn’t have any use for enterprise-oriented features and advanced reporting. Because of its modest hardware requirements, this WiFi site survey software tool can run even on old and low-end laptops without any problems.

Ekahau HeatMapper

You can use Ekahau HeatMapper to see WiFi coverage on a map and find all available networks in the surveyed area. Ekahau Pro adds 3D mapping capabilities that take into account wall materials, floor materials, antenna direction and up/downtilt , and a whole host of other factors.

How to Perform a WiFi Site Survey Using NetSpot?

One wireless site survey software tool that meets all these criteria is NetSpot. This professional app for wireless site surveys, WiFi analysis, and troubleshooting supports passive and active surveys (predictive surveys will be supported with the release of the next major version), and runs on any MacBook (macOS 10.10+) or PC (Windows 7/8/10/11) with a standard 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax wireless network adapter.

One wireless site survey software tool that meets all these criteria is NetSpot

NetSpot has two major modes of operation, called Discover and Survey. Using the former mode, you can instantly gather discover all WiFi networks in your area and obtain all important information about them, including their names, channels, signal level, interference, noise, and more. The latter mode allows you to create interactive color-coded WiFi heatmaps with detailed information on all surveyed wireless networks in every point of the map.

Regardless of which of the two major modes of operation you select, you can always save all collected data as a CSV file. Heatmaps can be saved as PNG files, and active visualization can be exported into the PDF file format.

Survey mode NetSpot

To perform a WiFi site survey using NetSpot:

  1. Launch NetSpot and click “Start a New Survey.”
NetSpot — Start a New survey
  1. Name your site survey and then give a name to the first zone you want to scan.
  1. Either load an existing map of the surveyed area from your computer or draw it using the map creation tool included with NetSpot.
NetSpot Scan
  1. Click on two points on the map and input the actual distance between them.
  1. Walk to one corner of the surveyed area and click the point on the map that corresponds to where you are standing.
  1. Continue moving and scanning until you have covered the whole area.
  1. Click the Stop Scan button when done.

When you finish your survey, NetSpot will automatically generate heatmap visualizations, so that the only thing left for you to do is analyze them.

SO, WE RECOMMEND
NetSpot
Wi-Fi Site Surveys, Analysis, Troubleshooting runs on a MacBook (macOS 10.10+) or any laptop (Windows 7/8/10/11) with a standard 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax wireless network adapter.
  • 4.8
  • 969 User reviews
  • #1
  • Wi-Fi Site Surveys, Analysis, Troubleshooting

  • 500K
  • Users
  • 8
  • Years
  • Cross-platform
  • Mac/Windows

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If you want to get more information about Wi-Fi, check out the following articles about Wi-Fi routers, the best apps for wireless networking, WiFi signal, etc.
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Wi-Fi Site Surveys, Analysis, Troubleshooting runs on a MacBook (macOS 10.10+) or any laptop (Windows 7/8/10/11) with a standard 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax wireless network adapter.