Well, that was interesting. I’ve run the free version around the house and come out with this map. It’s good that it’s all green but that little scale seems to say that yellow/red is where it’s at… yet I don’t seem to have much yellow or red?!?
The little icons are what the app it telling me, the arrows are me point at where the WAP’s really are. All the scans were run from my 2013 rMBP. The house is a single story place in the suburbs. The front of the house has the TimeCapsule, the back cupboard has the AirPort Extreme, both are cabled back to the network (and those two are pretty close to accurate). Red Arrows show these.
The two blue arrows are AirPort Expresses, the one in the meals area is playing wireless bridge to supply an ethernet connection to my Sony Mini System (which does AirPlay). It has it’s own WiFi, but this seems to work more reliably. The one closer to the lounge is also playing wireless bridge plugged into a USB printer (so it’s wireless!).
The random reading in the laundry/bed2??? Who knows. Nothing there unless it’s a reflection off a wall or something? The one in the meals area is pretty close the AirPort Express.
To add to all that, sitting at the red dot in the lounge near the entry (is my lounge chair). I get 15MB/s or so transfer to and from the NAS over Wireless N, so it’s hardly a poor connection.
So the free version can only show so 5 AP’s at the same time, so you have to selectively turn them on and off and see what comes up on the heatmap, clearly the Pro version would allow all of them at once, but since you’re only interested in what you can connect to, especially in a home environment that’s probably not a huge problem.
For me I flicked through the various AP’s one by one and most game me blue coverage (ie at or close to 0dB). But there was a few that were stronger, these were the strongest five:
(how the hell there is red in my house on those vs my own??? especially in the middle of the house? you could understand if it was leeching in from one side through a window or something, but that one is odd!
Which gave me this map, none of which are actually in my house.
For reference, the lounge is at the front, where the road is. There are houses to the left and right but nothing behind us as it opens up onto some council land.
So how does that compare to others networks?
Given the average user isn’t about to drop $150 to test their house it will be interesting to see just how much useful information the free version provides.
