Although not totally clear of the well used channel 11 , Channel 13 is little used and well worth considering. However some devices e.g. Blackberry cannot use channels 12,13 which are not available in the USA.
Positioning the wifi router away from windows and external doors will reduce its "vision" of the world outside your house and thus reduce external signals.
Going to the router. But to get the full effect you'll have to crouch in the middle of the house with your portable device.
Completely open WiFi in someones home is now not as common as it was. The security default in new kit is now on rather than off but I suspect that quite a few are running the default password though...
Of course these scanner apps don't show the true picture of what is actually using RF in 2.4GHz. There is a Point to Point WiFi link here, it's not shown by these scanners only my AP shows up. I bet they don't show video senders or any of the other stuff either.
BT at least seem to send each one out with a high entropy default random PW now. But there are still plenty or routers with null or very well known passwords and that broadcast their model number as SSID.
I think it depends a bit on the scanner but obviously it will only show connectable WiFi.
Don't most require the WEP to be entered in the computer trying to access it?
WEP offers limited security due to a design flaw anyway - there are turnkey dedicated hacker/cracker tools out there for years now.
Routers with a standard and known to the hacker community default password or key and broadcasting their model number as SSID are pretty much sitting ducks like leaving your keys in the front door. I have yet to see this notation in use but there was an amusing article on hackers "war chalking" open networks a while back. Our North Yorks police force saw fit to broadcast it to all and sundry when it became fashionable.
I wouldn't really expect a WiFi based scanner to show *everything* in the
2.4GHz band but I'd expect it to show anything WiFi ish.It's a limitation that you need to be aware of when using these things though. Crappy WiFi might be down to umpteen video senders, leaky microwave ovens, etc not just poor WiFi channel choice.
Most do now. But for a while the default "out of the box" set up was no security and no encryption. Any body could just connect and use with all the data being sent as plain text. Not the seperation of "security" and "encryption".
Indeed it is we once had a very upmarket 2.4 Ghz radio link taken out buy a leaky microwave oven some 100 yards away!..
I can only surmise its got a lot worse since then . Indeed some streets in Cambridge if you drive down then with netstumbler on its almost a continuous tone instead of the individual bleeps that are normally the case, the number of wi-fi points on the go;!...
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