Today I came across this article titled How to Find the Best Wi-Fi Chanel with Wireless Diagnostics in Mac OS X that basically explains how to use the bundled Wi-Fi scanner that comes with OS X Mavericks to choose the best channel for your wireless network.
I feel obligated to make some comments and clarifications about it. First, the channel recommendations the tool gives are useless and could make things worse. For example, and generally speaking, the 2.4 GHz band has only 3 non-overlapping channels. These are channels 1, 6 and 11. If channel 1 is crowded, you don't go ahead and pick the next channel, i.e. channel 2, you actually choose the next non-overlapping channel, in this case channel 6 (unless it's also crowded, then you move to the next non-overlapping channel). That's why choosing the right channel for a network in the 2.4 GHz band is not that easy and many times all you can do is to select the less occupied non-overlapping channel, hoping for the best. This tool doesn't make a difference between non-overlapping and overlapping channels. In other words, it considers all channels equally and just recommends the next less occupied channel.
Second, it seems the tool makes the channel recommendations based on the readings from all the routers around, including the one you're connected too. Well, if you're already using the "best" channel, the tool might actually recommend you a different one. Then guess what, if you change your access point to the recommended channel and run the tool again, it will probably recommend you the channel your router was set to originally. You can keep doing that all day if you want, but what a waste of time, don't you think?
If you're looking for a Mac tool that can help you choose the best channel for your network take a look at WiFi Signal and see how its channel recommendations make sense. And if you want to do a more comprehensive analysis of the Wi-Fi environment, consider WiFi Explorer. WiFi Explorer doesn't provide automatic channel recommendations, but will let you quickly and easily choose the best channel for your network.
