Wireless – How to Find Out Which Wi-Fi Frequencies Are Being Used Nearby

configurationfrequencynetworkingwireless

We have a lot of WiFi connections nearby and I'd like to know which band has the least interference. I'd like to to know how many connections are on each band and pick the best to configure my router from that data.

Best Answer

You can get detailed information about a wireless interface by using the iwlist command.

Run the below command from the command line, just copy and paste:

sudo iwlist wlan0 scan | grep Frequency | sort | uniq -c | sort -n

And you will get a result like this:

  2                     Frequency:2.412 GHz (Channel 1)
  2                     Frequency:2.417 GHz (Channel 2)
  2                     Frequency:2.462 GHz (Channel 11)
 10                     Frequency:2.437 GHz (Channel 6)

As an extra bit of useful data, you can see what frequencies your wifi card supports using this command:

iwlist wlan0 channel
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