Is your wireless internet connection getting dropped quite frequent? Is your wireless internet connection is slow lately? One primary reason could be because of many wireless connections in your neighborhood using the same communication channel. How do you find out about the channels that your neighbor’s wireless connections use to make sure you don’t use the same channel?

Use Vistumbler. Vistumbler is a open source wireless network scanner for Vista that helps you find wireless networks in your vicinity and it gives you quite a lot of information about those wireless networks.

You can use the “Scan APs” to start scanning the wireless access points. You’ll get a list of wireless networks visible in your vicinity. 

The thing that’s really useful with Vistumbler is that it gives you enormous amount of detail about the wireless connections including,

• Active or Dead status
• Mac Address
• SSID
• Signal Strength
• Channel Number
• Authentication Type
• Encryption Type
• Network Type
• Latitude
• Longitude
• Device Manufacturer
• Device Label
• Signal (Radio) Type
• Basic Transfer Rates
• When it became first active
• When was it last updated

That’s a lot of information for you to diagnose certain issues with your wireless connection.

If you look on the left side tree view of the window you could see that all the available wireless networks are neatly organized by many different factors including,

• Authentication Type
• Channel Number
• Encryption Type
• Network Type
• SSID

So, if there are too many wireless networks in your vicinity (like mine) this would come in handy to find out about all the wireless networks in my vicinity that uses, let’s say, channel# 11 so I can see if changing my wireless network’s channel to, let’s say, channel# 09 might help or not.

Let’s say if I want to find out all the unsecured wireless networks in my vicinity, I just expand the “Encryption” node and then “None” and there I can see all the unsecured wireless networks in my vicinity. These extra information about the wireless networks would come in real handy when you are travelling/roaming and need to grab a wireless signal.

Windows Vista’s “Connect to a Network” option is decent enough but doesn’t give you enough information about the wireless network connections. Vistumbler fills the gap to find out more about the wireless network connections in your vicinity.

If you don’t want to install another freeware on your computer then you can use this Vista command to find out about the wireless networks,

netsh wlan show networks mode=bssid

It doesn’t give you much detail as Vistumbler does but if you don’t want to install another freeware then you can use the command option.

If you are using Windows XP then you can use Netstumbler which does pretty much the same but on Windows XP.

Both Vistumbler and Netstumbler can detect wireless standards 802.11b, 802.11a and 802.11g.

Download Vistumbler

Download Netstumbler

If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to ask us in comments.